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The Ruling Class

What the Ruling Class Doesn't Want You to Know

"The people will not be happy to learn that there is only one natural right – the right of the superior to rule over the inferior, the master over the slave, the husband over the wife, and the wise few over the vulgar many.”  ~~  Leo Strauss, mentor to many top US politicians

Dear friends,

Most people are aware that a powerful elite has an inordinate amount of control over what happens in our world. Yet few are aware just how small and cohesive this group is. They are, in fact, akin to a ruling class which, by controlling what is debated by the public and what is not, are able to forward a well hidden, very undemocratic agenda.

Below is a compilation of key excerpts on this ruling class from a highly revealing essay titled "US Electromagnetic Weapons and Human Rights." This scholarly essay with many useful footnotes deals not only with the dangers of electromagnetic weapons, it also reveals how the ruling class thinks.

This intriguing research reveals how the ruling class has been so successful in manipulating the topics of public debate to create polarization, while at the same time carefully suppressing discussion of their own tactics and highly successful agendas. It will help you to better understand some of the craziness taking place in our world. Thanks for caring.

With best wishes for a transformed world,
Fred Burks for PEERS and WantToKnow.info
Former White House interpreter and whistleblower

The Ruling Class
By By Peter Phillips, Lew Brown, and Bridget Thornton

A long thread of sociological research documents the existence of a dominant ruling class in the US that sets policy and determines national political priorities. The American ruling class is complex and inter-competitive, maintaining itself through interacting families of high social standing with similar life styles, corporate affiliations, and memberships in elite social clubs and private schools.[1]

This American ruling class is self-perpetuating,[2] maintaining its influence through policy-making institutions such as the National Manufacturing Association, National Chamber of Commerce, Business Council, Business Roundtable, Conference Board, American Enterprise Institute, Council on Foreign Relations and other business-centered policy groups.[3]

C. Wright Mills, in his 1956 book The Power Elite, documents how World War II solidified a trinity of power in the US, comprised of corporate, military and government elites in a centralized power structure motivated by class interests and working in unison through “higher circles” of contact and agreement. Mills described how the power elite were those “who decide whatever is decided” of major consequence.[4]

With the advent of the military-industrial complex after World War II, President Eisenhower observed that an internal military industrial power faction was consolidating their long-term plans for the domination of America and, eventually, the world. Eisenhower was in no position to fight these men, and history records his feelings on the subject with the text of his short farewell address:

[The] conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”[5]

We now understand that Eisenhower was referring to the conjunction of redirected tax monies to research secret new technology aimed at nothing less than increasing the controlling power of the military industrial elite to a global scale.

One particular faction of ambitious men, the former cold warriors and neo-conservatives, were close followers of philosopher Leo Strauss. This elite group included not just generals and industrialists but philosophers, scientists, academics, and politicians who have now become the most powerful public-private war organization ever known.

Strauss espoused an elitist philosophy that fawned over the characteristics of those who inherited wealth and lived lives of leisure to pursue whatever their interests may be. His ideas have been transformed into a cogent ideology in which the media, religion, and government are used to subdue the masses while those in the ruling class follow their own will without regard to the laws designed to control lesser men.

Strauss was likewise fond of secrecy, as a necessity for control, because if the lesser men found out what was being done to them they would no doubt be upset. “The people will not be happy to learn that there is only one natural right – the right of the superior to rule over the inferior, the master over the slave, the husband over the wife, and the wise few over the vulgar many.” In On Tyranny, Strauss refers to this natural right as the “tyrannical teaching” of his beloved ancients.[6]

Leo Strauss, Albert Wohlstetter, and others at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought receive wide credit for promoting the neo-conservative agenda through their students, Paul Wolfowitz, Allan Bloom, and Bloom’s student Richard Perle.

The Canadian cultural review magazine Adbusters defines neo-conservatism as, “The belief that Democracy, however flawed, was best defended by an ignorant public pumped on nationalism and religion. Only a militantly nationalist state could deter human aggression. Such nationalism requires an external threat, and if one cannot be found it must be manufactured.”[7]

There is ample evidence available to show that some individuals within government and industry have little problem with violating the public trust and using their positions to kill, maim, torture and destroy. It is of the utmost importance to our traditional American values of human rights and cognitive liberty that we recognize this threat from within. We must move to identify those in the ruling class who show these proclivities and ensure that their activities have adequate oversight.

Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment involving obedience to authority proved that individuals are fairly easily cowed into submitting to anyone who has a claim of authority. On average 61 percent of people will administer pain to another person if instructed to do so.[8] Test groups in these experiments rationalized their behavior by appealing to “the greater good.” Because it was for the “advancement of science” they were able to be convinced they should ignore personal judgment and obey the instructions given to them by the experimenters to inflict pain.[9]

Today the combination of political climate and technological capability presents a condition in which widespread manipulation of, not only the flow of information through the media, but also the manipulation of the emotional states and cognitive ability in large populations can be achieved. If policy elites in the ruling class are unaccountable to the public for their actions, and the public is emotionally manipulated to support them, we can assume that they will certainly abuse their positions in the pursuit of their hidden agendas.

Psychological Warfare, Information War, and mind control may seem to be exotic topics, but the impact of these technologies and techniques is profound. Our minds are being impacted through a longstanding series of programs aimed at manipulating public opinion through intelligence agencies, think tanks, corporate media and a host of non-governmental organizations designed to engender fear, division and uncertainty in the public.[10]

Media manipulation involving the artificial framing of our collective reality [and] psychological operations have been carried out by the ruling elite in the past, and are being carried out even today, through the practices of “Information Warfare,” directed at enemies abroad and at the American people.[11]

Their global dominance agenda includes penetration into the boardrooms of the corporate media in the US. A research team at Sonoma State University recently finished conducting a network analysis of the boards of directors of the ten big media organizations in the US. The team determined that only 118 people comprise the membership on the boards of director of the ten big media giants. These 118 individuals in turn sit on the corporate boards of 288 national and international corporations. Four of the top 10 media corporations in the US even have Department of Defense contractors on their boards of directors.

Given an interlocked media network, big media in the US effectively represent the ruling elite. The media elite, a key component of the ruling class in the US, are the watchdogs of acceptable ideological messages, the controllers of news and information content, and the decision makers regarding media resources.[12]


"They're not evil. These organizations consist of well-educated elitists who're self-absorbed perhaps, but not evil. They look at the world as a biological experience where the strong survive, the powerful thrive, and the secretive control. They are the ultimate control freaks not for the sake of adoration or ego-gratification, but because they genuinely believe they're the best at making policy decisions that effect the world's economy and security. They simply want to protect their life's agenda like anyone else would."   ~~  Dr. Anderson


Final Note:
For excellent, one-paragraph summaries revealing several key organizations of the ruling class in an astonishing way, see this webpage. For lots more on the ruling class and how they impact our lives and world, see this online lesson.




[1] G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America? (New York: McGraw Hill, 2006 [5th ed.] and Peter Phillips, A Relative Advantage: Sociology of the San Francisco Bohemian Club, 1994, (http://library.sonoma.edu/regional/faculty/phillips/bohemianindex.html)

[2] Early studies by Charles Beard in the Economic Interpretations of the Constitution of the United States (1929), established that economic elites formulated the US Constitution to serve their own special interests. Henry Klien (1933) in his book Dynastic America claimed that wealth in America has power never before known in the world and was centered in the top 2% of the population owning some 60% of the country. Ferdinard Lundberg (1937) wrote American’s Sixty Families documenting inter-marrying self-perpetuating families where wealth is the “indispensable handmaiden of government."

[3] See R. Brady, Business as a System of Power, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943) and Val Burris, "Elite Policy Planning Networks in the United States," American Sociological Association paper 1991.

[4] C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956).

[5] Public Papers of the Presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1960, p. 1035 - 1040. A video of this farewell address is available here.

[6] Leo Strauss, “On Tyranny”, Edited by Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth, University Of Chicago Press, 2000.

[7] Guy Caron, “Anatomy of a Neo-Conservative White House,” Canadian Dimension, May 1, 2005.

[8] Stanley Milgram “Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View”, New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Discussion and video available here.

[9] “Obedience as a determinant of behavior is of particular relevance to our time,” Behavioral Study of Obedience, Stanley Milgram, Yale University, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Vol. 67, No. 4, p. 371

[10] For an analysis on the interlocking of the corporate media, think tanks and government organizations, see Peter Phillips, Bridget Thornton and Lew Brown “The Global Dominance Group and the US Corporate Media” in Censored 2007, Seven Stories Press.

[11] See: Snow, Nancy, Information War American Propaganda, Free Speech, and Opinion Control Since 9/11, 2004 Seven Stories Press and Chomsky, Noam Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda, 2002 Seven Stories Press

[12] The Global Dominance Group and the US Corporate media, by Peter Phillips, Bridget Thornton and Lew Brown, published in Censored 2007, Seven Stories Press, 2006, Chapter 10,

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