Cambridge's Draper Laboratory's Brent Scowcroft/Scowcroft Group Connection

Coincidentally, the Draper Laboratory Chairman of the Board since October 2013--a “Principal” of former Kissinger Associates Vice-Chairman Brent Scowcroft’s Scowcroft Group named Franklin Miller---previously worked “twenty-two years in the Department of Defense…and four years as a Special Assistant to President George W. Bush” before joining The Cohen Group of former U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen for five years, according to The Scowcroft Group’s website. And between June 2015 and July 2016, Scowcroft Group Principal Miller was paid $71,625 for being Draper Laboratory’s board chairman, according to Draper Laboratory’s 2015 Form 990 financial filing.

Besides being Draper Laboratory’s chairman of the board, Scowcroft Group Principal Miller—who “provides clients both strategic and tactical advice on defense”—has also, coincidentally, been a member of the Defense Policy Board, the U.S. Strategic Command Advisory Group and the Council on Foreign Relations. And in addition, he has, coincidentally, sat on the board of directors of EADS North America (a subsidiary of Airbus Group that profits from its Pentagon war and homeland security government contracts), the Sandia Corporation (which develops more modern nuclear weapons for the Pentagon) and the Atlantic Council of the United States (whose board of directors and international advisory chairman emeritus is, coincidentally, Scowcroft Group President and Principal Brent Scowcroft).

After joining former Nixon Administration Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s for-profit Kissinger Associates “consulting”/influence-peddling firm in 1982, Draper Laboratory board chairman Miller’s business partner at the Scowcroft Group, Brent Scowcroft, was hired by the government of Kuwait’s Kuwait Petroleum Corporation [KPC] to sit alongside Ali Jabar Al Ali Al-Sabah on the board of directors of KPC’s U.S. subsidiary at that time, Santa Fe International; and Scowcroft sat on the Kuwait government’s Santa Fe International corporate board in 1984, 1985 and 1986, according to Poor’s & Standard’s Register of Corporations. Yet in the early 1990’s the former director of Kuwait’s major U.S. subsidiary at that time—Scrowcroft Group President Scowcroft—was allowed to sit in a White House office as then-President H.W. Bush I’s National Security Affairs advisor. As the Scowcroft Group “consulting”/influence-peddling firm’s website notes:

“As President of The Scowcroft Group…Brent Scowcroft provides clients with unparalleled strategic advice and assistance…Brent Scowcroft served as the National Security Advisor to both Presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush, the only individual in U.S. history appointed to the position under two different Presidents. From 1982 to 1989, he was Vice Chairman of Kissinger Associates, Inc., an international consulting firm. In this capacity, he advised and assisted a wide range of U.S. and foreign corporate leaders on global joint venture opportunities…His…twenty-nine-year military career…included… Special Assistant to the Director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Military Assistant to President Nixon….Out of uniform, General Scowcroft...formerly served as the Chairman of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board...”

And not surprisingly, when the Iraqi troops of the now-executed Saddam Hussein marched into Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990, it was the presentation of Scowcroft-- the former member of the corporate board of the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation’s Santa Fe International U.S. subsidiary-- -- at a National Security Council meeting on Aug. 3, 1990, “that made clear what the stakes were, crystallized people’s thinking and galvanized support for a strong response” to the Iraqi military occupation of Kuwait, according to a Feb. 2, 1991 New York Times article;  and, at this meeting, “Scowcroft stated that..he believed the United States had to be willing to use force” and “that Saddam had to be toppled…covertly through the CIA, and be unclear to the world,” according to Bob Woodard’s 1991 book The Commanders. But after the United States began “to use force” in Iraq in January 1991,  U.S. military forces apparently killed around 100,000 Iraqis people in the 1991 Gulf War to restore Al-Sabah family monarchical rule in Kuwait, while at least 849 U.S. troops were either killed or wounded in the same war; and during the next 10 years more than 9,600 of the U.S. soldiers involved in the first Gulf War, who “were often required to enter radioactive battlefields unprotected and were never warned of the dangers of Depleted Uranium” weapons, reportedly also died, according to Project Censored’s Censored 2004 book.

Coincidentally, Draper Laboratory Chairman Miller’s 91-year-old Scowcroft Group business partner also currently is a “Strategy Partner” at Torch Hill Investment Partners, whose for-profit investment portfolio includes stock in Zephyr Photonics, which “is a US-based…photonics company that is focused on providing solutions to the Department of Defense, aerospace, and intelligence markets” that “has developed its unique technology over 60 contracts from US Government agencies…and defense prime contractors,” according to the Torch Hill Investment Partners website. 

Obama's Geithner-Froman/Citigroup-Kissinger Associates Connection

“Michael Froman ’91 has been named deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs, a position to be held jointly at the National Security Council and the National Economic Council….A former chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin during the Clinton administration, Froman also served in the Treasury as deputy assistant secretary for Eurasia and the Middle East. He was also director for international economic affairs on the National Economic Council and the National Security Council…. Most recently, Froman was a managing director of Citigroup’s Citi Alternative Investments Institutional Clients Group, where he was head of infrastructure and sustainable development. He also served on 12-member advisory board of the Obama campaign’s transition team.”

--from a Feb. 3, 2009 news item on the Harvard Law School website

“Even more intriguing is Geithner’s informal brain trust, loaded with Wall Street luminaries. Since coming to the Fed in November 2003—recruited by then-New York Fed chairman Pete Peterson, co-founder of the Blackstone Group—Geithner has learned the ways of the financial industry…He was almost immediately taken under the wing of Gerald Corrigan, a…former New York Fed chief who is now a managing director of Goldman Sachs. Corrigan describes his relationship with Geithner as close, and it has flourished since Geithner’s first days at the Fed. Another frequent adviser—`you don’t want those things to get too formal,’ Corrigan notes—is also a preeminent banker, Merrill Lynch C.E.O. John Thain, a Goldman alumnus and former head of the N.Y.S.E.  Over the years, Thain has often talked to Geithner—`sometimes I talk to him multiple times a day’ Thain says. Geithner’s network also includes former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, an old acquaintance, as well as the heads of the European central banks, hedge fund managers, academics, and his immediate predecessor, William McDonough, architect of the 1998 Long-Term Capital Management bailout and now a vice chairman of Merrill."

--from Gary Weiss’s May 12, 2008 Upstart Business Journal article

"...Geithner was born in Brooklyn in 1961, and grew up in a series of far-flung, exotic locales…Hhis father, Peter Geithner, joined the United States Agency for International Development and moved his family…to Salisbury, Rhodesia. Peter Geithner came from Columbian Carbon International, a Fortune 500 conglomerate…,In 1968, Peter Geithner accepted a position with the Ford Foundation and the family moved…to New Delhi...After graduate school, his father had deferred going into government to gain private-sector experience; so did the son, landing a job in 1985 at Kissinger Associates, the consulting firm founded by Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, and Lawrence Eagleburger.
“…This was a stroke of almost unimaginable good fortune. It did not come by chance. Scowcroft had called the dean at Johns Hopkins and asked him to recommend an Asia specialist; he recommended Geithner… Kissinger took note of his young charge. Geithner was asked to write a series of longer papers, not for the firm but for Kissinger personally…Although Geithner moved on to the government after three years, Kissinger remains an enthusiastic backer…."

--from an April 2010 article in The Atlantic magazine

Obama’s Geithner-Froman/Citigroup-Kissinger Associates Historical Connection

Not much change in either the high U.S. unemployment rate or the special influence of white Wall Street bankers over U.S. government policy was produced by the Democratic Obama Administration between 2009 and 2012.

One reason might be because a white Citigroup managing director named Michael Froman—apparently one of Barack Obama’s close friends at Harvard Law School—successfully pushed Obama to appoint a white former Federal Reserve Bank of New York president and Kissinger Associates executive named Timothy Geithner to be the Obama Administration’s Secretary of the Treasury between 2009 and 2012. As Newsweek magazine columnist Jonathan Alter recalled in his 2010 book The Promise: President Obama, Year One:

“

Obama…knew that as president of the New York Fed, Tim Geithner was right at the center of the bailout action, consulting closely with [George W. Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury] Paulson…Obama and Geithner had met for the first time during the fall campaign [in 2008], in a secret meeting at the W Hotel in New York…Like Obama, Geithner had grown up abroad in Zimbabwe, Zambia, India and Thailand…During the early 1980s, Geithner’s father, Peter Geithner, oversaw the Ford Foundation’s micro-credit program and had…met once with one of its Indonesian program officers, S. Ann Dunham-Ssotero, Obama’s mother…Trained well by his years under Henry Kissinger in the consulting business, Geithner played hard-to-get…

“…Michael Froman, a…Citi banker and one of the transition chiefs, was pushing hard for his old friend Geithner. Froman had become close friends with Obama at Harvard Law School…Obama bonded with Geithner personally…Geithner gave what critics called `backdoor bailouts’ of tens of billions to some of the wealthiest financial institutions in the world…

“…[Center for American Progress CEO and Obama Transition Co-Chief John] Podesta, a major link to the Clintons, favored Geithner…Even after the vetters discovered disturbing tax problems on Geithner’s record—problems that would cause Obama considerable embarrassment six weeks later…he [Obama] stuck with his choice…Obama…lobbied a huge bank rescue bill through Congress…His advisors rejected WPA-style direct government hiring…Government jobs would have attacked unemployment immediately. (In 1934 FDR and his relief administrator, Harry Hopkins, created 4 million jobs in two months…The failure to think more boldly about creating jobs fast would haunt the administration…The Obama advisors figured that as long as unemployment stayed under 10 percent for the year, they could slide through…

“…Obama worked the phones…Tim Geithner made the rounds of the Senate Democrats and told them he had made mistakes…while still in his job as head of the New York Fed…The second bailout was approved…5 days before the Inauguration [in 2009]…Even before becoming president, Obama was drawing from his political capital to win approval for Bush’s bailouts…

“…Geithner paid only what he owed [in taxes] for the years that he was audited, 2003 and 2004. He had also worked as a consultant in 2001 and 2002 and knew perfectly well that he owed back taxes for those years too…”

So don’t expect the second term of a Democratic Obama Administration to be anymore successful in producing a change in in either the high U.S. unemployment rate or the special influence of white Wall Street bankers over U.S. government policy between 2013 and 2017 than it was between 2009 and 2012.