Who's Running America?

Years ago, a friend of mine, Tom Dye, a political science professor, researched the theory that a ruling elite such as the Bilderbergers or the Trilateral Commission controls America and especially American foreign policy. From a Googled article about his book Who's Running America? The Clinton Years :

Professor Dye has made these lists of who's in power for every administration since 1976, and the quality of the data he supplies makes it easy to see the continuation of these powerful forces from 1940 through today. "My argument," says Professor Dye, "that industrial wealth and banks and other centers of financial power are influencing government comes essentially from a system in which foundations [receive] large grants from wealthy corporations and in turn fund various policy planning groups." Groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, the Bookings Institution in Washington, the Heritage Foundation in Washington, the American Enterprise Institute and other policy planning groups, according to Professor Dye, really set the agenda for the congress and the president and other governmental agencies. "In other words," says Dye, "these are the folks that operate sort of behind the governmental reporting that we get. We get reports on bills introduced in congress and what congress does in committee and on the floor and so on. But we don't get an awful lot of reports in the news media on what the Council on Foreign Relations is planning for us in terms of our international role. What are we doing in terms of NATO expansion and so on, and that's all really been pretty well planned out ahead by the Council on Foreign Relations before it gets to the news media and before it gets in the President's speech."

"...All governments are by the few," rather than by the people, continues Dye. "There is no way to have government by the people. All governments are by the few. We are fortunate that in a democracy we can select which few we want to have governance, in a sense.... You're probably going to get the same kinds of people -- they'll be different people, but they'll have the same backgrounds and the same schools and the same universities and the same social backgrounds, regardless of whether Bob Dole or Bill Clinton is elected."

When I talked to him back in the Reagan years, his conclusion was that there was no grand hidden conspiracy. It seems that by 1996 he had begun to see some patterns.

---

Supreme Court case pits Bush against Texas over death penalty for Mexican
MARK SHERMAN
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON — To put it bluntly, Texas wants President Bush to get out of the way of the state's plan to execute a Mexican for the brutal killing of two teenage girls.

Bush, who presided over 152 executions as governor of Texas, wants to halt the execution of Jose Ernesto Medellin in what has become a confusing test of presidential power that the Supreme Court, which hears the case this week, ultimately will sort out.

The president wants to enforce a decision by the International Court of Justice that found the convictions of Medellin and 50 other Mexican-born prisoners violated their rights to legal help as outlined in the 1963 Vienna Convention.

That is the same court Bush has since said he plans to ignore if it makes similar decisions affecting state criminal laws.

"The president does not agree with the ICJ's interpretation of the Vienna Convention," the administration said in arguments filed with the court. This time, though, the U.S. agreed to abide by the international court's decision because ignoring it would harm American interests abroad, the government said.

Texas argues that neither the international court nor Bush has any say in Medellin's case.

Medellin was born in Mexico but spent much of his childhood in the United States. He was 18 in June 1993, when he and other members of the Black and Whites gang in Houston encountered two teenage girls on a railroad trestle.

The girls were gang-raped and strangled. Their bodies were found four days later.

Medellin was arrested a few days later. He was told he had a right to remain silent and have a lawyer present, but the police did not tell him that he could request assistance from the Mexican consulate.

Medellin gave a written confession. He was convicted of murder in the course of a sexual assault, a capital offense in Texas. A judge sentenced him to death in October 1994.

Medellin did not raise the lack of assistance from Mexican diplomats during his trial or sentencing. When he did claim his rights had been violated, Texas and federal courts turned him down because he had not objected at his trial. Mexico later sued the United States in the International Court of Justice in The Hague on behalf of Medellin and 50 other Mexicans on death row in the U.S.

---

It seems that too much of US foreign policy with regard to Mexico is conducted in the shadows. The agenda is set by an otherwise disparate group of corporations, globalists, and transnationalists. Ordinarily their individual agendas may be at odds with one another but on the issue of North America, they seem to have found common ground.