10.06
The Council has been the subject of debate, as shown in the 2006 film by Aaron Russo, America: Freedom to Fascism and a 2007 documentary Zeitgeist, the Movie. This is partly due to the number of high-ranking government officials in its membership, along with world business leaders, its secrecy clauses, and the large number of aspects of American foreign policy that its members have been involved with, beginning with Wilson’s Fourteen Points. The John Birch Society believes that the CFR plans a one-world government. Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech was the first in which he suggested a worldwide security organization to prevent future world wars.
Historian Carroll Quigley included the CFR in his discussion of the Anglo-American Establishment’s efforts to shape international developments during the 20th century. His book “Tragedy and Hope” was cited by conspiracy theorists as showing that the CFR was engaged in a conspiracy against American interests, though Quigley himself denied this.
Systems theorists working with tools developed at MIT by Jay Forrester counter David Rockefeller’s support for his goals with the claim that an attempt to build an integrated global political and economic structure is a serious danger to humanity’s freedom and prosperity. They argue that a dearth of distributed systems on a global scale would mean, first, a globe more susceptible to total economic and/or resource calamity, and second, a world in which lack of competition between rival political systems would make totalitarianism—if ever globally established—extremely difficult to challenge. Supporting the former charge, they cite the recession of 2008, which was exacerbated by the global nature of capital and derivative markets, as an example of the dangers of extreme economic interdependency.