Big $'s Lawyers Run the U.S. Government and Serve their Clients, Not Us
Let's take a close look.
A lawyer is a person who represents and serves his/her client. This is the nature of what it means to be a lawyer. This is the skill that students attending a law school learn. Law schools also teach their students the ethics of the legal profession: that a lawyer serves his/her client to the best of his/her ability. A lawyer is paid by their client to serve the client’s interests with all the skill and talent and expertise and, of course, “connections,” that they have. With this in mind, consider the curious fact that most of the key positions in the executive branch of the federal government are held by lawyers. Who are their clients? Who do they serve?
President Joe Biden and his top-heavy-with-lawyers cabinet
President Joe Biden is a lawyer with a doctor of law (a.k.a. JD) degree from Syracuse University. His cabinet (go here to see who they all are) is top-heavy with lawyers, as shown in the list of cabinet-member lawyers below.
Vice President Kamala Harris is a lawyer: UC Law San Francisco.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken is a lawyer: JD Columbia University.
Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland is a lawyer: JD University of New Mexico.
Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack is a lawyer: Albany Law School.
Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo is a lawyer: JD Yale Law School.
Attorney General Merrick Garland is, of course, a lawyer: JD Harvard Law School.
Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su is a lawyer: JD Harvard Law School.
Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra is a lawyer: JD Stanford Law School.
Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Marcia Fudge is a lawyer: JD Cleveland State University College of Law.
Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm is a lawyer: JD Harvard Law School.
Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas is a lawyer: JD Loyola Law School, Los Angeles.
Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines is a lawyer: JD Georgetown University Law Center.
United States Trade Representative Katherine Tai is a lawyer: JD Harvard Law School.
The clients these lawyers serve are very rich people, not ordinary Americans
Take Secretary of State Antony Blinken for example. Forbes magazine, in its article titled, “Inside The $10 Million Fortune Of Antony Blinken, Biden’s Secretary Of State,” describes the lawyerly career of Blinken and the clients he “advised” (i.e., served) with his firm named WestExec Advisors. Who are these clients? Forbes reports they included the following: “Uber, FedEx and Blackstone.” These are not exactly small companies. Blackstone describes itself this way:
“Blackstone is the world’s largest alternative asset manager, with $1 trillion in AUM [Assets Under Management]. We serve institutional and individual investors by building strong businesses that deliver lasting value. Our scale – with ~12,500 real estate assets(1) and 230+ portfolio companies(1) – enables us to invest in dynamic sectors positioned for long-term growth.”
Antony Blinken made a small fortune for himself by serving multi-billionaires who own huge fortunes. These billionaires ensure that the U.S. government works for THEM, not ordinary people like you and me, by staffing key positions in the government with THEIR lawyers. This is how the billionaire class rules from behind the scenes.
Antony Blinken does the bidding of the billionaire class primarily by ensuring that the U.S. government pursues a “neo-conservative” foreign policy that is aimed at preventing world peace from breaking out, and thus ensuring that Americans will be easy for the billionaire class to control. How so? Because we will feel surrounded by frightening bogeyman enemies from which the government pretends to protect us, thereby making it “unpatriotic” for us to seriously challenge the power of the ruling class (and the government that represents it) no matter how much this upper class treats us like dirt. I spell out this social-control motive of the U.S. billionaire plutocracy in my article, “Oppressors Need Bogeyman Enemies and Invent them When Necessary.” In its sub-section titled, “THE CULPRIT IS NOT ONLY THE ARMS MANUFACTURERS,” I show that the warmongering “neo-con” foreign policy that Antony Blinken pursues is desired not only by the arms manufacturers but also by the billionaire class as a whole.
The Lesson to Learn from the Deeds of Government-Lawyers John Foster Dulles and Allen Welsh Dulles (Both Partners in the Powerful Law Firm Sullivan & Cromwell, LLP) Is Not the Civics Lesson We’re Taught In School
The notion that our elected leaders such as the president have the real power in deciding what the government does and that they are beholden to us and that they serve us is simply not true. The starkest evidence it is not true can be seen by looking at the careers of the lawyers (and brothers) John F. Dulles who was Secretary of State under President Dwight D. Eisenhower from 1953 until his resignation in 1959, and Allen W. Dulles who served presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy as director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 1953 to 1961.
Both John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen W. Dulles were partners in the powerful law firm Sullivan & Cromwell. Let’s take a look at who some of the clients of this law firm are today (no doubt the clients in the past were of the same ilk.) Sullivan & Cromwell talk about some of their clients on their website. On this page the firm touts its successes with these words:
The Firm recently advised Credit Suisse in its $3.3 billion merger with UBS, the first merger of two global, systemically important banks since the 2008 financial crisis, and PacWest in its merger with Banc of California. S&C also helped Wells Fargo reach a global settlement with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that resolved novel consumer protection issues.
On another page Sullivan & Cromwell celebrates a victory this way:
S&C Prevails for Barclays in Credit Default Swap Litigation
February 6, 2024
Barclays Bank PLC obtained a ruling enjoining a proposed investor class action in New Mexico alleging that Barclays and other major banks conspired to manipulate the auction process used to value bonds and settle credit default swaps.
It’s clear that Sullivan & Cromwell represent big banks such as Credit Suisse, Wells Fargo and Barclays. Keep this in mind as we see what its famous Dulles brothers partners did as “public servants.”
Let’s start with the Eisenhower presidency years.
Granted, some presidents have seemed to be weak stand-ins for other stronger individuals, such as president George W. Bush seemed to be for Vice President Dick Cheney. But I think we can all agree that if ever there was a U.S. president who had the personality of a strong and self-confident commander, it was President Dwight D. Eisenhower. General Eisenhower, after all, had been the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II. And yet, a government lawyer countermanded his explicit orders! Here’s the story, as told (in part loosely quoted for brevity by me) by Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, chief of special operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Kennedy years, in JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy (Chapter Five).
On January 8, 1954, when Eisenhower had been president for one year, he presided over a meeting of the National Security Council with twenty-seven top-echelon national security advisers in attendance. When the subject turned to Southeast Asia the president was recorded to have said the following words “with vehemence”:
“The key to winning this war is to get the Vietnamese to fight. There is just no sense in even talking about United States forces replacing the French in Indochina. If we did so, the Vietnamese could be expected to transfer their hatred of the French to us. I cannot tell you how bitterly opposed I am to such a course of action. This war in Indochina woiuld absorb our troops by divisions!”
Colonel Prouty writes:
“That was the commander in chief speaking during that important National Security Council meeting of January 1954 to the secretary of defense, the secretary of state, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the individual chiefs of each of the military services, among others. That was his policy.
“President Eisenhower could not have expressed his views on the subject of a “Vietnam War” more forcefully…
“Lest there are still some among us who believe that the President runs this country, that the Congress participates effectively in determining the course of its destiny, and that the Supreme Court assures compliance with the Constitution and all federal laws, let them witness this action, and the results of this blatant disregard for all elements of government, as we find it on the record.
“Among those at the January 8, 1954, meeting of the National Security Council, when the President made his views known so forcefully, was Allen W. Dulles, director of central intelligence and brother of the secretary of state. There was no way that Allen Dulles could have misunderstood those words of President Eisenhower’s. There was no way that any question whatsoever about ‘how bitterly opposed’ the President was to placing U.S. troops in Indochina. But this is not how things work when modern underground warfare is involved…
“These are incredible men, these defiers of presidents. One might say that they do not need them. Ambassador George V. Allen, after a state dinner with John Foster Dulles, said, ‘Dulles spoke as if he had his own line to God and waas getting his instructions from a very high source.’
“Allen Dulles was also a lawyer and a partner with Sullivan & Cromwell. The brothers were in touch with the power elite, and a mere President influenced them not at all…
“This explains why so many of the visible activists in high places are lawyers. In that profession they are trained to work under the direction of their clients. They have been educated for such service in the higher universities, many of them with courses designed for just such purposes. and they are further trained in the major international law firms that make a business of providing many of their skilled ‘partners’ for top-level government service, for directorships on bank boards, and for major industrial position.
“In the case of Vietnam, the course followed by the U.S. government was established by these two international Wall Street lawyers, John Foster Dulles and Allen Welch Dulles, among other, more invisible powers. a review of the record of the early days of the war in Vietnam will reveal how they did it.
“On January 14, 1954, only six days after the President’s ‘vehement’ statement against the entry of U.S. forces in Indochina, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles said:
Despite everything that we do, there remained a possibility that the French position in Indochina would collapse. If this happened and the French were thrown out it would, of course, become the responsibility of the victorious Vietminh to set up a government and maintain order in Vietnam.
The secretary added:
[I do] not believe that in this contingency this country [the United States] would simply say, ‘Too bad, we’re licked and that’s the end of it.’
If we could carry on effective guerrilla operations against this new Vietminh government, w should be able to make as much trouble for this government [the Vietminh-formed Democratic Republic of Vietnam] as they had made for our side and against the legitimate governments of the Associated States in recent years. Moreover, the costs would be relatively low. Accordingly, an opportunity will be open to us in Southeast asiaa even if the French are finally defeated by the Communists. We can raise hell and the Communists will find it just as expensive toresist as we are now finding it.
What John Foster Dulles said exposed the method used to circumvent the views of the President about the introduction of U.S. forces: first, by ignoring him completely, and, second, by changing the words from “making war” to “raising hell” with “guerrilla operations.”
Further on in his book, Colonel Prouty describes how the CIA orchestrated forced migration of nearly one million people who lived in the north of Vietnam to the south of Vietnam where they were just dumped on the south’s population. The peasants in the south were angry at this (naturally) and then the U.S. government and its pro-Catholic puppet South Vietnam government did two things. First, they labeled as “Catholics” the people who were the victims of this forced migration from the north who were not Catholics. Second, they labeled as “Communists” the peasants in the south who objected to the dumping of these “Catholics” on them. Presto! There was now a “Communist uprising” that had to be repressed by any means necessary—ultimately “requiring” 500,000 U.S. troops, fighting a bogeyman enemy (North Vietnam) using weapons in large part supplied to them by the United States (as I discuss here.) But this early example of U.S. rulers using weapons of mass migration is a story for another time.
Who Told, and Who Authorized, Allen Dulles to Orchestrate the Assassination of President Kennedy?
Now let’s fast forward to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. There are (at least) two books that make a very persuasive case that the CIA orchestrated the assassination of Kennedy and one of these books (The Devil’s Chessboard) also shows that it was specifically Allen Dulles who did this after he had been fired by Kennedy from his position as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency and was thus a mere private citizen with no official governmental authority. The two books are these:
The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government by David Talbot
JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James W. Douglass
As these books make clear, the chief motive for killing JFK was to prevent him from carrying out his intention to end the Cold War. The people who feared the ending of the Cold War were the billionaires who benefited from it (as discussed above.) As detailed in The Devil’s Chessboard, Allen Dulles, as the former—but recently fired—Director of the Central Intelligence Agency arranged and orchestrated the JFK assassination. Dulles clearly acted in the interests of, and on the instructions of, his billionaire clients. Furthermore, the power that Dulles had—despite being a mere private citizen now—came from the fact that the key players in the CIA that Dulles relied upon to carry out his assassination orders knew that though he was only their former boss he was nonetheless indeed the representative of—the lawyer for—the people in the nation with the real power, and that to go against Dulles’s orders meant going against the wishes of people powerful enough to make one’s life very uncomfortable to say the least.
How Come U.S. Presidents Appoint Big $’s Lawyers to Government Positions In the First Place?
To get elected president of the United States one needs to have the backing of the billionaire class. The billionaire class funds the major political parties (go here for some details about this) and controls the mass media (go here for some details about this) that have the power to make or break a presidential candidate. Any politician who manages to get elected president has had to make promises to, and formed friendships with, billionaires and their representatives (lawyers). President’s know that they have little choice but to appoint Big $’s lawyers to high positions in their government. Especially after the assassination of president Kennedy, subsequent presidents know it is virtually suicidal to oppose the wishes of the billionaire class.
The Moral of this Story
The moral of this story is that a billionaire plutocracy rules the United States. This plutocracy was never elected and cannot therefore be un-elected. No matter whom we elect, the billionaire plutocracy has the real power. Only a massive popular egalitarian revolutionary movement, one that explicitly aims to remove the rich from power to have real, not fake democracy with no rich and no poor, can solve this problem. I suggest here how YOU can help build this movement.