The Pritzker Family: Interlock and Gleichschaltung
By Not Sure
23 July 2023
Foundations: Their Power
and Influence. Chapter 3, “The Concentration of
Power.”
United
States House Select Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations and Comparable
Organizations. That’s a mouthful, and
why this came to be known by the name of the congressmen who chaired it. In 1952, it was chaired by Edward M. Cox and
was known as the Cox Committee. Unhappy
with the conclusions of the Cox Committee, B. Carroll Reece pushed for a
continuation of the investigation into foundations, and this was called the
Reece Committee. The committee’s chief
investigator was former banker, Norman Dodd, and his findings were presented to
the U.S. Congress as the Dodd Report.
Dodd called the machinations of foundations “subversive,” and stated
that he meant by that term, “Any action having as its purpose the alteration of
either the principle or the form of the United States Government by other than
constitutional means.” He argued that
the funding of large institutions such as Harvard, University of Chicago, and
University of California, by foundations such as Ford Foundation, Rockefeller
Foundation and Carnegie Endowment, existed to enable oligarchical collectivism.
The
Reece Committee staff was headed by New York tax attorney, Rene A. Wormser, who
believed that the work they accomplished was of great importance, but more
needed to be investigated and exposed.
He continued researching this, and in 1958 published Foundations:
Their Power and Influence.
The
Cox Committee had been alarmed by the geographic concentration of power;
foundation trustees were concentrated on the Eastern Seaboard. Wormser believed that by focusing on
geography, the Cox Committee had “completely missed the point.” Enormous concentration of power could be
maintained by what Wormser referred to as “interlocks.” What mattered was “that a pattern of
interlocking operations existed at various levels of management.” It was clear enough that foundation trustees
often held multiple trustee positions and were sometimes simultaneously
trustees of grant-making and grant-receiving institutions. But what most troubled Wormser was that “They
can operate to force our culture into a uniform pattern.” He later wrote, “Their independent,
uncontrolled financial power often enables foundations to exert a decisive
influence on public affairs.”
Interlock
amongst the trustees of the Aspen Institute exists and some examples of that
can be seen at a glance, but with 73 trustees, the
work involved in creating a database and charting the interlock is beyond the
limits of my time. I decided to focus my
attention on establishing how many of the trustees were also members of the
Council on Foreign Relations. Fifteen
trustees are members of the CFR. The
chairwoman of the Aspen Institute is not a CFR member, but her husband is, and
her husband’s cousin. Katie Albright is
not a CFR member, but her sister Alice is.
Katie is also the daughter of the late Madeleine Albright, Secretary of
State under Bill Clinton. Remember? The one who said she thought the deaths of
half a million Iraqi children caused by sanctions were “worth it.”
Alan
Watt often referred to the Council on Foreign Relations as the “American
branch” of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House.) Considering that at least eleven of the
Institute’s trustees are not American, that reduces the number of trustees
eligible for the CFR to sixty-two. Fifteen
trustees of the Aspen Institute are also members of the Council on Foreign
Relations and an additional two trustees have at least one family member who
belongs to the CFR. Nearly a quarter of
those Trustees eligible to belong to the Council on Foreign Relations hold CFR
memberships.
The
Trilateral Commission (TC) has a more international blend of members. Trustee Jane Harman is a CFR member and a
member of the Trilateral Commission. Two
other Institute trustees are members of the TC, including James Manyika, a
Zimbabwean-American academic and business executive, Google’s first Senior
Vice-President of Technology and Society, who reports directly to Google’s CEO,
Sundar Pachai.
This
is how the Aspen Institute describes its trustees:
The Board of Trustees is made up of
high-level individuals from the public and private sectors who have been
elected by a majority of the membership of the board.
The board is responsible for providing counsel to the President, as well as
governance over the business, affairs, and property of the Aspen Institute. The
board meets three times per year and its ten standing committees meet regularly
to discuss, in depth, the key issues facing the organization.
Several
of the trustees are also members of The Aspen Strategy Group (ASG,) including
the CFR/Trilateral, Jane Harman. This is
made up of forty-four people and anyone with a little knowledge of American
politics will recognize many of the names.
Here are a few: Brent Scowcroft,
Condoleezza Rice, Mark T. Esper, Dianne Feinstein, Robert Gates, Sam Nunn,
David Petraeus, Lawrence H. Summers, Philip Zelikow (9/11 Commission.) From the world of banking: Thomas E. Donilon (BlackRock) and David M.
Rubenstein.
Of the 44 members of ASG, 37 are CFR
members. That forced me to dig a bit
deeper into the seven members who lacked CFR membership:
Lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft – Co-founded Aspen
Strategy Group in 1984 with Joseph Nye and Bill Perry. Various appointments in the National Security
Affairs (NSA.)
Christian Brose – Speechwriter for Condoleezza Rice
and Colin Powell. Policy advisor to John
McCain.
Chris Coons – U.S. Senator, specialist in U.S. policy
in Africa.
Peter Feavers – Academic --
foreign policy, nuclear proliferation, cybersecurity.
Robert Gates – Secretary of Defense under George W.
Bush, retained by Barack Obama. Director
of Central Intelligence (CIA.) Partner
in consulting firm with Condoleezza Rice.
Susan Glasser – Staff writer at New Yorker Magazine,
founded POLITICO Magazine, formerly editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy.
Kay Hutchison – Formerly
U.S. Permanent Representative to NATO in Brussels, U.S. Senator representing
Texas, 1993-2013.
***
Let’s
return to the Chairwoman and trustee of the Aspen Institute who is not a member
of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Margot L. Pritzker was elected to the Board in 2004 and has served the
Institute in several leadership positions.
She was the chair of the Leadership Committee and served on the
Executive Committee. She is a seminar
moderator for the Aspen Global Leadership Network.
Margot
is the wife of Thomas Pritzker, a billionaire, and the CEO of the Pritzker
Organization, which manages the various Pritzker family assets. He is also chairman of Hyatt Hotels
Corporation. Thomas Pritzker is a member
of the Council on Foreign Relations, and he is a member of the Aspen Strategy
Group. (For “interlock” there is also
Trustee Mark Hoplamazian, the CEO of Hyatt Hotels
Corporation.)
Thomas
Pritzker’s cousin is Penny Pritzker, a billionaire businesswoman who was
secretary of commerce under Barack Obama.
She is on the board of Microsoft, the chair of the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace, and was involved in Chicago organizations, including
the Chicago Department of Education, before her participation in national
politics. She is a member of the Council
on Foreign Relations and a member of the Aspen Strategy Group. She is the sister of the current governor of
Illinois, J.B. Pritzker.
J.B.
Pritzker has been instrumental in the formation of what is known as the Urban
7, which fosters cities to form leagues, one goal being the fulfillment of the
UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The
Chicago Council on Global Affairs (CCGA) is part of the process of localizing
globalization. The CCGA’s Forum on
Global Cities has now been renamed the Pritzker Forum on Global Cities.
The
relationship between the Pritzker family and Barack Obama goes back many years
and their support was key in his rise to power.
Like a debutante at a ball, Obama was groomed and presented to the world
at the Aspen Institute, when he was interviewed by Walter Isaacson in
2005. Obama’s 2006 book The Audacity
of Hope was heavily promoted, as a little-known Illinois politician was being
prepared to take the world stage.
Thomas
and J.B. and Penny Pritzker have a cousin named Jennifer. Jennifer Pritzker is retired from the
Illinois Army National Guard and is an inventor and a philanthropist. Born James Nicholas Pritzker in 1950, J.N.
underwent an official name change in 2013 to publicly reflect “the beliefs of
her true identity.” Jennifer Pritzker
has been defined as the world’s first transgender billionaire.
Journalist
Jennifer Bilek does not like the term “transgenderism” as she thinks it is “no
clear boundaries.” She has opted to use
the term Synthetic Sex Identities (SSI.)
Bilek has shown how some of the philanthropic gifts from the Pritzker
family (among many other foundations,) to recipients in the “techno-medical”
complex have contributed to the expanding list of SSI
“language reforms” and the rapid normalization of “gender affirming care”
within the medical and research institutions.
***
Gleichschaltung
is a compound German word from gleich (same)
and schaltung (circuit.) This was a Nazi term for the coordination process
of Nazification that allowed Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Party to take
totalitarian control over all aspects of society “from the economy and trade
associations to the media, culture and education.”
In
Foundations: Their Power and Influence, Rene Wormser wrote (in 1958,) “What
is wrong is permitting any Gleichschaltung or even the appearance of
it. Anything in the
nature of a cartel-like coordination in education and in such vital
fields as foreign relations and the social science studies…endanger[s] the
freedom of our intellectual and public life.
The emergence of this special class in our society, endowed with
immense powers of thought control, is a factor which must be taken
into account in judging the merits of contemporary foundation
operations. The concentration of power,
or interlock, which has developed in foundation-supported social-science
research and social-science education is largely the result f a capture of the
integrated organizations by like-minded men.
The plain, simple fact is that the so-called ‘liberal’ foundation
movement in the United States has captured most of the major foundations and
has done so chiefly through the professional administrator class, which has not
hesitated to use these great public trust funds to political ends and with bias.”
(emphasis Wormer’s.)
Are we there yet?
© Not Sure
Additional reading:
The Billionaire Family Pushing Synthetic Sex
Identities (SSI)
Meet the Urban 7, the bridge from ‘global cities’ to
world-governance policy circles
Council on Foreign Relations – membership roster
https://www.cfr.org/membership/roster