How the Oil Industry Conquered
Medicine, Finance, and Agriculture
Story at-a-glance
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“How Big Oil Conquered the World” is a brilliant
piece of investigative journalism, revealing the
immense extent to which the oil industry has shaped
and is ruling the world as we know it
John D. Rockefeller’s father, William Avery
Rockefeller, was an authentic "snake oil salesman"
going by the fictional name of “Dr. Bill
Livingston,” who made money conning people into
buying a fake cancer cure
Rockefeller and other key players who made their
fortune in the oil business have taken over and now
control education, medicine, the monetary system,
and the food supply, in a quest to monopolize all
aspects of life
By Dr. Mercola
“How Big Oil Conquered the World” is a brilliant piece of
investigative journalism presented by James Corbett,1
revealing the immense extent to which the oil industry has
shaped and is ruling the world as we know it.
“From farm to pharmaceutical, diesel truck to dinner
plate, pipeline to plastic product, it is impossible to
think of an area of our modern-day lives that is not
affected by the petrochemical industry.
The story of oil is the story of the modern world.
And this is the story of those who helped shape that world,
and how the oil-igarchy they created is on the verge of
monopolizing life itself.”
Corbett carefully details the sordid back story of today’s
“oiligarchy.” While most people are well-acquainted with the
Rockefeller name, few probably know the true history of the
Rockefeller’s rise to power.
Big Oil — An Industry Founded on Treachery and Deceit
As noted by Corbett, certain details of the Big Oil story are
well known. Others are more obscure. The story begins in rural
New York State in the early 19th century, with William Avery
Rockefeller, an authentic “snake oil salesman” going by the
fictional name of “Dr. Bill Livingston.”
While neither a doctor nor a cancer specialist, Rockefeller,
aka “Dr. Livingston,” aka “Devil Bill,” traveled the country’s
back roads conning people into buying his “Rock Oil” tonic for
cancer — “a useless mixture of laxative and petroleum and had no
effect whatsoever,” according to Corbett.
William Avery Rockefeller fathered numerous children with
three women, and took the name Livingston after being indicted
for rape in 1849. One of those children was John D. Rockefeller,
who became the world’s first billionaire after founding Standard
Oil.
As noted by Corbett:
“When he wasn’t running away from them or
disappearing for years at a time, [William Avery
Rockefeller] would teach his children the tricks of his
treacherous trade. He once bragged of his parenting
technique: ‘I cheat my boys every chance I get. I want to
make ’em sharp’ ...
The world we live in today is the world created in
‘Devil’ Bill’s image. It’s a world founded on treachery,
deceit, and the naivety of a public that has never wised up
to the parlor tricks that the Rockefellers and their ilk
have been using to shape the world for the past century and
a half.”
The Birth of the Oil Industry
Another character with a similarly dubious background is
“Colonel” Edwin Drake, an unemployed railroad conductor who
managed to secure himself a job with the Pennsylvania Rock Oil
Company after running into the founders, George Bissell and
James Townsend, at a hotel.
The title “Colonel” was bestowed on him by Bissell and
Townsend, who thought it might help him “win the respect of the
locals” as he went about the company’s business, collecting
Seneca oil, which the company distilled into kerosene (lamp
oil).
His mission was to collect enough Seneca oil to make the
business profitable — a task that turned out to be more
difficult than expected, as mere gallons could be collected
using the standard collection methods.
Eventually, he tried drilling through the shale bedrock to
reach greater reservoirs of oil, and on August 28th, 1859 —
literally the day he’d used up the last of his funds — the oil
began to flow from the ground. And with that, a new industry was
born.
It didn’t take long before homes and factories around the
world were using lamp oil refined from crude, and prospectors
from around the country flocked to Pennsylvania in search of the
“black gold.”
Among them was John D. Rockefeller, a Cleveland bookkeeper
who, according to Corbett, had two ambitions in life: “To make
$100,000 and to live to 100 years old.” With a $1,000 loan from
his father, “Devil Bill,” John D. Rockefeller set off to make
his fortune.
The Standard Oil Monopoly
After a series of partnerships and mergers over a 7-year
period, John D. Rockefeller eventually incorporated Standard Oil
of Ohio in 1870. According to the report:
“The next year, he quietly put what he called ‘our
plan’ — his campaign to dominate the volatile oil industry —
into devastating effect. Rockefeller knew that the refiner
with the lowest transportation cost could bring rivals to
their knees.
He entered into a secret alliance with the railroads
called the South Improvement Company. In exchange for large,
regular shipments, Rockefeller and his allies secured
transport rates far lower than those of their bewildered
competitors.
Ida Tarbell, the daughter of an oil man, later
remembered how men like her father struggled to make sense
of events: ‘An uneasy rumor began running up and down the
Oil Regions,’ she wrote.
‘Freight rates were going up. … Moreover … all
members of the South Improvement Company — a company unheard
of until now — were exempt. … On every lip there was but one
word and that was ‘conspiracy.'”
By the time he was 40, John D. Rockefeller controlled 90
percent of the global oil refineries. Within another few years
(early 1880s), he also controlled 90 percent of the marketing of
oil, and one-third of all oil wells. His power and influence
cannot be overstated at this point.
He had an international monopoly on what was to
become the most important commodity in the world economy.
Following in Rockefeller’s footsteps were a handful of other
wealthy families, including the Nobels, the Rothschilds, the
Dutch Royal family, and millionaire William Knox D’arcy, who was
the first to strike oil in Persia.
These early “Oil Barons” became enormously wealthy. And as
billions of people became increasingly dependent on oil for
virtually every aspect of life, they gained tremendous power and
influence.
However, oil could have been replaced by other
resources, were it not for the shrewd manipulation by these
early “oiligarchs.”
The Death of the Electric Car, and Other Lucky Breaks
The advent of the electric light bulb took a good chunk out
of the lamp oil market and temporarily threatened the oil
monopoly. But lamp oil was quickly replaced by the need for
gasoline to run the two-stroke internal combustion engine,
invented by German engineer Karl Benz.
In 1888, Benz Motorwagen became the first commercially
available automobile, and with that, the petroleum industry’s
profits were again secured. But even then their ongoing monopoly
was not guaranteed. The first electric car had been built in
1884, and by 1897, electric cars were gaining popularity in
London. In the early 20th century, 28 percent of cars sold in
the U.S. were also electric. As noted by Corbett:
“The electrics had advantages over the internal
combustion engine: they required no gear shifting or hand
cranking, and had none of the vibration, smell, or noise
associated with gasoline-powered cars. Lady Luck intervened
again on January 10, 1901, when prospectors struck oil at
Spindletop in East Texas.
The gusher blew 100,000 barrels a day and set off the
next great oil boom, providing cheap, plentiful oil to the
American market and driving down gas prices. It wasn’t long
before the expensive, low range electric engines were
abandoned altogether and big, loud, gas-guzzling engines
came to dominate the road ...”
Interestingly, the event that made John D. Rockefeller into
the world’s first billionaire was supposed to rein in
his unbridled power. He’d come under intense scrutiny as his
wealth increased, and on May 15, 1911, the U.S. Supreme Court
declared Standard Oil a monopoly “in restraint of trade” and
ordered its dissolution.
But by dissolving the company into multiple entities, shares
of Standard Oil tripled in value, and in a few short years,
Rockefeller’s worth equaled nearly 2 percent of the total U.S.
economy.
“For the oiligarchy, the lesson of the rise and rise
of Rockefeller was obvious: the more ruthlessly that
monopoly was pursued, the tighter that control was grasped,
the greater the lust for power and money, the greater the
reward would be in the end. From now on, no invention would
derail the oil majors from their quest for total control. No
competition would be tolerated. No threat to the oiligarchs
would be allowed to rise.”
The Continued Squashing of Competition
While the electric car had been successfully eliminated,
thereby securing Big Oil profits, another competing resource was
on the horizon: alcohol.
Henry Ford designed his Model T automobile to run on either
gasoline or alcohol, stating that just about anything that could
be fermented could be used for fuel, predicting the future of
fuel was wide open to a number of alternatives. However, the oil
industry succeeded in eliminating the competition yet again.
This time by supporting the anti-alcohol movements and the
formation of the Prohibition Party in 1869. While Rockefeller
avoided alcohol, his chief concern was not to uphold morality in
the U.S. The prohibition served his agenda by creating
burdensome restrictions on ethanol producers, and as ethanol
became more costly, its attraction as an alternate fuel ceased.
Also, as detailed in my previous article about Clair
Patterson’s fight to eliminate
leaded gasoline, once the high compression engine was
invented, car manufacturers started running into performance
problems. General Motors diagnosed the problem, realizing that
the problem originated with the fuel. General Motors tried about
15,000 different combinations of elements to find a solution to
the engine knocking.
Adding benzene from coal to gasoline was found to work. Ditto
for adding grain alcohol. Adding 10 percent alcohol to gasoline
raised the quality of the fuel, causing less knocking in the
engine. It also had other benefits, including clean combustion,
which eliminated soot emissions, and increased horsepower
without engine knocking.
But as research continued, General Motors determined that
adding lead to the gasoline produced “an ideal
anti-knock fuel” — ideal mostly because manufacturing the lead
additive, tetraethyl lead, would allow them to make the greatest
profits. Were they to add alcohol to the gasoline, the oil
industry stood to lose a large amount of petroleum sales,
anywhere from 10 to 20 percent, depending on how much alcohol
was added.
By adding lead, the oil industry had a product it could again
control in its entirety. So Standard Oil partnered with General
Motors, creating a joint corporation known as Ethyl Corporation.
Leaded gasoline became the norm, and over the next 80 years,
countless people were sickened and harmed by this neurotoxic
fuel additive, thrust upon the people for no other reason than
it created the greatest profits.
Big Oil Secretly Buys Up and Dismantles Public Transportation
System
In 1936, Standard Oil and General Motors also took part in
the reformation of public transportation. Only 10 percent of
Americans owned a car, and most city dwellers relied on electric
trolley networks. By replacing the electric streetcars with
gasoline-guzzling buses, the oil industry secured an even
greater foothold within the U.S. economy. As detailed in
Corbett’s report:
“The cartel had been careful to hide their
involvement in National City Lines, but it was revealed to
the public in 1946 by ... Edwin J. Quinby ... He uncovered
the oiligarchs’ stock ownership of National City Lines and
its subsidiaries and detailed how they had step by step
bought up and destroyed the public transportation lines in
Baltimore, Los Angeles, St. Louis and other major urban
centres...
[I]n 1947 National City Lines was indicted for
conspiring to form a transportation monopoly and conspiring
to monopolize sales of buses and supplies. In 1949, GM,
Firestone, Standard Oil of California and their officers and
corporate associates were convicted on the second count of
conspiracy.
The punishment for buying up and dismantling
America’s public transportation infrastructure? A $5,000
fine. H. C. Grossman, who had been the director of Pacific
City Lines when it oversaw the scrapping of LA’s $100
million Pacific Electric system, was fined exactly $1.”
Next came the undermining of the railway system. In 1953,
General Motor President Charles Wilson was appointed Secretary
of Defense, and Wilson, along with Francis DuPont, Chief
Administrator of Federal Highways, set into motion the largest
public works project in U.S. history with the creation of the
interstate highway system.
As a result, railway travel declined by 84 percent between
1945 and 1964, while private car ownership soared, and along
with it, gasoline sales, which rose 300 percent in that same
time frame. Similar social engineering feats took place in
Europe, further securing the future of the oil business as a
primary force to be reckoned with.
The report also goes into the details behind the gas
shortages that sent the U.S. into a financial tailspin in the
early 1970s, revealing how the secretive Bilderberg Group,
created by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands in 1954,
successfully created a new financial system based on the
petrodollar — a system that granted the "oiligarchs"
unprecedented control over the economy.
The Rockefeller Transformation
In his day, John D. Rockefeller was a despised man. This all
changed when he hired Ivy Ledbetter Lee, who essentially
invented the public relations industry as we now know it.
John D. was filmed handing out dimes to the poor, and was
publicly portrayed as a kind and warm-hearted man. While hokey
by today’s standards, such simple stunts worked, yet Rockefeller
needed to go even further to truly gain the public’s trust.
As Corbett notes:
“In order to win the public over, he was going to
have to give them what they wanted. And what they wanted
wasn’t difficult to understand: money. But just as his
father, Devil Bill, had taught him to do in all his business
dealings, Rockefeller made sure to get the better end of the
bargain. He would ‘donate’ his great wealth to the creation
of public institutions, but those institutions would be used
to bend society to his will.
As every would-be ruler throughout history has
realized, society has to be transformed from the ground up.
Americans in the 19th century still prized education and
intellectual pursuits ... with a remarkable 93 to 100
percent literacy rate.
Before the first compulsory schooling laws in
Massachusetts in 1852, education was private and
decentralized, and as a result ... a solid grounding in
history and science was widespread. But a nation of
individuals who could think for themselves was anathema to
the monopolists. The oiligarchs needed a mass of obedient
workers...”
The Take-Over of Education
John D. Rockefeller’s first great act of charity was the
establishment of the University of Chicago, followed later by a
$180 million donation to the establishment of the General
Education Board. But contrary to what you might think, these
acts of generosity were not to further education, but to control
and impoverish it.
Frederick Taylor Gates became a trusted ally, and in “The
Country School of Tomorrow” Gates lays out Rockefeller’s plan
for the education of future Americans:
“In our dream, we have limitless resources, and the
people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding
hand. The present educational conventions fade from our
minds; and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good
will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try
to make these people or any of their children into
philosophers or men of learning or science.
We are not to raise up from among them authors,
orators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for
embryo great artists, painters, musicians. Nor will we
cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among
them lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of
whom we now have ample supply.”
The Effective Strategy That Eliminated Natural Medicine
Other oil-backed schemes to mold and reshape the American
education system followed, including a scheme to alter the
teaching of American history to promote a view of collectivism,
as well as a program culminating in the transformation of the
practice of medicine.
Naturopathic-based herbal medicine was the norm, and
Rockefeller set out to shift the medical industry toward using
oil-derived pharmaceuticals. To this end, the Rockefeller
Institute for Medical Research was established in 1901, headed
up by Simon Flexner.
“His brother, Abraham, was an educator who was
contracted by the Carnegie Foundation to write a report on
the state of the American medical education system. His
study, 'The
Flexner Report,' along with the hundreds of
millions of dollars that the Rockefeller and Carnegie
Foundations were to shower on medical research in the coming
years, resulted in a sweeping overhaul of the American
medical system.
Naturopathic and homeopathic medicine, medical care
focused on un-patentable, uncontrollable natural remedies
and cures was now dismissed as quackery; only drug-based
allopathic medicine requiring expensive medical procedures
and lengthy hospital stays was to be taken seriously ...
The fortunes of Carnegie, Morgan and Rockefeller
financed surgery, radiation and synthetic drugs. They were
to become the economic foundations of the new medical
economy ... The oiligarchy birthed entire medical industries
from their own research centers and then sold their own
products from their own petrochemical companies as the
‘cure.’”
The Take-Over of America’s Financial System, and the Creation of
a Food Monopoly
The financial power of these oil industry giants is by now
near-unfathomable, but the aim was to control the entire
financial system. This was effectively accomplished with the
creation of the Federal Reserve, established in 1913 following a
secret meeting on Jekyll Island, during which the details were
ironed out. Attendants at this meeting included John D.
Rockefeller Jr.’s father-in-law, Senator Nelson Aldrich, and
various banking representatives.
Later, in the 1950s, James Stillman Rockefeller, the grandson
of John D.’s brother, became the head of National City Bank,
while David Rockefeller, John D.’s grandson, took over Chase
Manhattan Bank. Still, they were not satisfied.
“Springboarding from success to success as they
consolidated monopolies across every field of human
activity, the oiligarchs’ ambitions became even larger. This
time, their goal was to consolidate control over the very
food supply of the world itself, and once again they would
use philanthropy as the cover for their business takeover,”
Corbett explains.
The Rockefeller Foundation funded the Green Revolution that
led to the introduction of petroleum-based agricultural
chemicals, which quickly transformed agriculture, both in the
U.S. and abroad. President Johnson’s “Food for Peace” program
actually mandated the use of petroleum-dependent technologies
and chemicals by aid recipients, and countries that could not
afford it were granted loans from the International Monetary
Fund and the World Bank.
The “Gene Revolution” was next, and as noted by Corbett:
“The players involved in this ‘Gene Revolution’ are
almost identical to the players in the Green Revolution,
with I.G. Farben offshoots Bayer CropScience and BASF Plant
Science mingling with traditional oiligarch associate
companies like Dow AgroScience, DuPont Biotechnology, and,
of course, Monsanto, all funded by the Rockefeller
Foundation ...”
The Final End Game: Monopolizing Life
In his usual style, Corbett manages to squeeze in an
incredible amount of information in as compact a timeframe as is
humanly possible, and I highly recommend taking the time to
watch the video in full. What I’ve included here is but a
summary overview of the many details he brings forth in this
fascinating report.
Those who are ignorant of history are bound to repeat it, and
if this story tells us anything, it is that unless we realize
what has been done, we’ll be deceived again, and again, because
the oil oligarchy’s end game is yet to be realized — if we let
them. As Corbett notes in closing:
“The takeover of education, of medicine, of the
monetary system, of the food supply itself, showed that the
aim was much greater than a mere oil monopoly: it was the
quest to monopolize all aspects of life. To erect the
perfect system of control over every aspect of society,
every sector from which any threat of competition to their
power could emerge ... But the oiligarchs are not done yet.
Their next project, launched in the late 20th
century, is almost too ambitious to be comprehended ... It
is about the monopolization of life itself. They have spent
decades preparing the path for this takeover and marshaled
their mind-boggling resources in service of the task. And
the vast majority of the world’s population, still playing
the shell game that the oiligarchs perfected and abandoned
long ago, are about to fall right into their hands yet
again.”