This is the story of how the oil-igarchy is on the verge
of monopolizing life itself.
Oil. 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.
Parts of that story are well-known:
Rockefeller and Standard Oil; the internal combustion engine and the
transformation of global transport; the House of Saud and the oil wars
in the Middle East. Other parts are more obscure: the quest for oil and
the outbreak of World War I; the petrochemical interests behind modern
medicine; the Big Oil money behind the “Green Revolution” and the “Gene
Revolution.”
But that story, properly told, begins
somewhere unexpected. Not in Pennsylvania with the first commercial
drilling operation and the first oil boom, but in the rural backwoods of
early 19th century
New York state. And it doesn’t start with crude oil or its derivatives,
but a different product altogether: snake oil.
“Dr. Bill Livingston, Celebrated Cancer
Specialist” was the very image of the traveling snake oil salesman. He
was neither a doctor, nor a cancer specialist; his real name was not
even Livingston. More to the point, the “Rock Oil” tonic he pawned was a
useless mixture of laxative and petroleum and had no effect whatsoever
on the cancer of the poor townsfolk he conned into buying it.
He lived the life of a vagabond, always
on the run from the last group of people he had fooled, engaged in ever
more outrageous deceptions to make sure that the past wouldn’t catch up
with him. He abandoned his first wife and their six children to start a
bigamous marriage in Canada at the same time as he fathered two more
children by a third woman. He adopted the name “Livingston” after he was
indicted for raping a girl in Cayuga in 1849.
When he wasn’t running away from them or
disappearing for years at a time, he 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.”
A towering man of over six feet and with
natural good looks that he used to his advantage, he went by “Big Bill.”
Others, less generously, called him “Devil Bill.” But his real name was
William Avery Rockefeller, and it was his son, John D. Rockefeller, who
would go on to found the Standard Oil monopoly and become the world’s
first billionaire.
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.
This is the story of the oil-igarchy.
(This article is a transcript from
the documentary, How Big Oil Conquered The World.)
Part One: Birth of the Oil-igarchy
Titusville, 1857. A most unlikely man
alights from a railway car into the midst of this sleepy Western
Pennsylvania town on the shores of Oil Creek: “Colonel” Edwin Drake.
He’s from the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company, and he’s here on a mission:
to collect oil.
Like “Dr.” Bill, Drake isn’t really a
Colonel. The title is bestowed on him by George Bissell and James
Townsend, a lawyer and a banker who started the Pennsylvania Rock Oil
Company after they discovered they could distill the region’s naturally
occurring Seneca oil into lamp oil, or kerosene. Drake is actually an
unemployed railroad conductor who talked himself into a job after
staying at the same hotel as Bissel the year before. Calling him a
Colonel, it is hoped, will help win the respect of the locals.
The locals think he’s crazy anyway. Seneca
oil is indeed plentiful, bubbling out of seeps and collecting in the
creek, but other than as a cure-all medicine or grease for the local
sawmill’s machinery, it’s hardly seen as something valuable. In fact, it
can be a downright nuisance, contaminating brine wells that supply
Pittsburgh’s booming salt industry.
Still, Drake has a task to complete:
finding a way to collect enough oil to make the distillation of Seneca
oil into lamp oil profitable. He tries everything he can think of. The
Native Americans had historically collected the oil by damming the creek
near a seep and skimming the oil off the top. But Drake can only collect
six to ten gallons of oil a day this way, even when he opens up extra
seeps. He tries digging a shaft, but the groundwater floods in too
quickly.
By the summer of 1859 he’s desperate.
Drake’s running out of ideas, Bissell and Townsend are running out of
patience and, most importantly, the company is running out of funds. He
turns to “Uncle” Billy Smith, a Pittsburgh blacksmith who had experience
drilling brine wells with steam-powered equipment. They get to work
drilling down through the shale bedrock to reach the oil. It’s
maddeningly slow work, with the crude equipment struggling to get
through three feet of bedrock a day. By August 27th they’ve drilled down
69 and a half feet, Drake has used the last of his funds, and Bissell
and his partners have decided to close up the operation.
Then on Sunday, August 28th, 1859, oil
bubbled up the drive pipe. Uncle Billy and his son Sam bailed out
several buckets of oil. On Monday, the very day that Colonel Drake
received his final payment and an order to close down the operation,
they hitched the walking beam to a water pump and the oil began to flow.
The first oil was to sell for $40 a barrel. Years later a local
newspaper interviewed Uncle Billy about the day they struck oil:
“I commenced drilling and at 4:00 I
struck the oil. I says to Mr. Drake, ‘Look there! What do you think
of this?’ He looked down the pipe and said, ‘What’s that?’ And I
said, ‘That is your fortune!’”
Drake’s well proved that by drilling for
it, oil could be found in abundance and produced cheaply. Overnight a
whole new industry was born. Before long in millions of homes, farms and
factories around the world, lamps would be lit with kerosene refined
from West Pennsylvania crude.
“When the word came out that Drake
had struck oil, the cry went up throughout the narrow valleys of
Western Pennsylvania: ‘The crazy Yankee has struck oil! The crazy
Yankee has struck oil!’ And it was the first great boom. It was like
a gold rush.” ~ Daniel Yergin [Source: The
Prize (Part 1)]
Overnight the quiet farming backwoods of
rural Pennsylvania was transformed into a bustling oil region, with
prospectors leasing up flats, towns springing up from nowhere, and a
forest of percussion rigs covering the land. The first oil boom had
arrived.
Already poised to make the most of this
boom was a young up-and-coming bookkeeper in Cleveland with a head for
numbers: John Davison Rockefeller. He had two ambitions in life: to make
$100,000 and to live to 100 years old. John D. set off to make his
fortune in the late 1850s, armed with a $1000 loan from his father,
“Devil” Bill.
Grandfather never finished high
school and went to Cleveland having borrowed $1000 from his father
to start a business — paid 9% interest on it incidentally. And he
read about the oil business just beginning and got interested, and
came to realize it was a very volatile business at the time.” ~ David
Rockefeller [Source: The
Prize (Part 1)]
In 1863, seeing the oil boom and sensing
the profits to be made in the fledgling business, Rockefeller formed a
partnership with fellow businessman Maurice B. Clark and Samuel Andrews,
a chemist who had built an oil refinery but knew little about the
business of getting his product to market. In 1865 the shrewd John D.
bought out his partners for $72,500 and, with Andrews as partner,
launched Rockefeller & Andrews. By 1870, after five years of strategic
partnerships and mergers, Rockefeller had incorporated Standard Oil.
The story of the rise of Standard Oil is
an oft-told one.
In a move that would transform the
American economy, Rockefeller set out to replace a world of independent
oilmen with a giant company controlled by him. In 1870, begging bankers
for more loans, he formed Standard Oil of Ohio. 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. … Nobody waited to find out his neighbor’s opinion. On every lip
there was but one word and that was ‘conspiracy.’”
“By 1879, when Rockefeller is 40, he
controls 90 percent of the oil refining in the world. Within a few
years, he will control 90 percent of the marketing of oil and a
third of all of the oil wells. So this very young man controls what
is not only a national but an international monopoly in a commodity
that is about to become the most important strategic commodity in
the world economy.” ~ Ron Chernow, Biographer
[Source: The
Rockefellers]
By the 1880s, the American oil industry
was the Standard Oil Company. And Standard Oil was John D.
Rockefeller. But it wasn’t long until a handful of similarly ambitious
(and well-connected) families began to emulate the Standard Oil success
story in other parts of the globe.
One such competitor emerged from the
Caucasus in the 1870s, where Imperial Russia had opened
up the vast Caspian Sea oil deposits to private development. Two
families quickly combined forces to take advantage of the opportunity:
the Nobels, led by Ludwig Nobel and including his dynamite-inventing
prize-creating brother Alfred, and the French branch of the infamous
Rothschild banking dynasty, led by Alphonse Rothschild.
In 1891, the Rothschilds contracted with
M. Samuel & Co., a Far East shipping company headquartered in London and
run by Marcus Samuel, to do what had never been done before: ship their
Nobel-supplied Caspian oil through the Suez Canal to East Asian markets.
The project was immense; it involved not only sophisticated engineering
to construct the first oil tankers to be approved by the Suez Canal
Company, but the strictest secrecy. If word of the endeavour was to get
back to Rockefeller through his international intelligence network it
would risk bringing the wrath of Standard Oil, which could afford to cut
rates and squeeze them out of the market. In the end they succeeded, and
the first bulk tanker, the Murex,
sailed through the Suez Canal in 1892 en route to Thailand.
In 1897 “M. Samuel & Co.” became The
Shell Transport and Trading Company. Realizing that reliance on the
Rothschild/Nobel Caspian oil left the company vulnerable to supply
shocks, Shell began to look to the Far East for other sources of oil. In
Borneo they ran up against Royal Dutch Petroleum, established in The
Hague in 1890 with the support of King William III of the Netherlands to
develop oil deposits in the Dutch East Indies. The two companies,
fearing competition from Standard Oil, merged
in 1903 into the Asiatic Petroleum Company, jointly owned with the
French Rothschilds, and in 1907 become Royal Dutch Shell.
Another global competitor to the
Standard Oil throne emerged in Iran at the turn of the 20th century. In
1901 millionaire socialite William Knox D’arcy negotiated an incredible
concession with the king of Persia: exclusive rights to prospect for
oil throughout most of the country for 60 years. After 7 years of
fruitless search, D’Arcy and his Glasgow based partner, Burmah Oil, were
ready to abandon the country altogether. In early May of 1908 they sent
a telegram to their geologist telling him to dismiss his staff,
dismantle his equipment and come back home. He defied the order and
weeks later struck oil.
Burmah Oil promptly spun off the
Anglo-Persian Oil Company to oversee production of Persian oil. The
British government took 51% majority control of the company’s shares in
1914 at
the behest of Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty,
and survives today as BP.
The Rothschilds and Nobels. The Dutch
royal family. The Rockefellers. These early titans of the oil industry
and their corporate shells pioneered a new model for amassing and
expanding fortunes hitherto unheard of. They were the scions of a new
oligarchy, one built around oil and its control, from wellhead to pump.
But it was not just about money. The
monopolization of this, the key energy resource of the 20th century,
helped secure the oiligarchs not just wealth but power over the lives of
billions. Billions who came to depend on black gold for the provision of
just about every aspect of their daily lives.
In the late 19th century, however, it
was by no means certain that oil would become the key resource of the
20th century. As cheap illumination from the newly-commercialized light
bulb began to destroy the market for lamp oil, the oiligarchs were on
the verge of losing the value from their monopoly. But a series of
“lucky strikes” was about to catapult their fortunes even further.
The very next year after the commercial
introduction of the light bulb, another invention came along to save the
oil industry: German engineer Karl Benz patented a reliable, two-stroke
internal combustion engine. The engine ran on gasoline, another
petroleum byproduct, and became the basis for the Benz Motorwagen that,
in 1888, became the first commercially available automobile in history.
And with that stroke of luck, the business that Rockefeller and the
other oiligarchs had spent decades consolidating was saved.
But more luck was needed to ensure the
market for this new engine. In the early days of the automobile era it
was by no means certain that gas-powered cars would come to dominate the
market. Working models of electric vehicles had been around since the
1830s, and the first
electric car was built in 1884. By 1897 there was a fleet
of all-electric taxis shuttling passengers around London. The world land
speed record was set by an electric car in 1898. By the dawn of the
20th century electric cars accounted for 28%
of the automobiles in the United States. 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, all fueled by the black gold that Standard
Oil, Shell, Gulf, Texaco, Anglo-Persian and the other oil majors of the
time were drilling, refining and selling.
Perhaps John D.’s greatest stroke of
luck, however, was not supposed to be luck at all. Rockefeller had come
under increasing scrutiny by a public outraged by the unprecedented
wealth he had amassed through Standard Oil. Muckraking reporters like
Ida Tarbell began digging up the dirt on his rise to power through
railroad conspiracies, secret deals with competitors and other shady
practices. The press pictured
him as a colossus with bribed politicians literally in the palm of
his hand; Standard Oil was a menacing
octopus with its tentacles strangling the lifeblood of the nation.
Hearings began, investigations were launched, lawsuits were brought
against him. And then, finally, in 1911 the Supreme Court made a
monumental decision.
On May 15th, 1911, the Supreme Court of the United States declared
that Standard Oil was a monopoly in restraint of trade and should be
dissolved. Rockefeller heard of the decision while golfing at Kykuit with
a priest from the local Catholic church, Father J.P. Lennon.
And Rockefeller reacted with amazing
aplomb. He turned to the Catholic priest and said, “Father Lennon,
have you some money?” And the priest was very startled by the
question and said, “No.” And then he said, “Why?” And Rockefeller
replied, “Buy Standard Oil.” ~ Ron Chernow, Biographer
As Rockefeller foresaw, the individual Standard Oil companies were
worth more than the single corporation. In the next few years, their
shares doubled and tripled in value. By the time the rain of cash was
over, Rockefeller had the greatest personal fortune in history — nearly
two percent of the American economy.
“And it was really losing the
antitrust case that converted John D. Rockefeller into history’s
first billionaire. So that Standard Oil was punished in the federal
antitrust case, but John D. Rockefeller, Sr. most assuredly was
not.” ~ Ron Chernow, Biographer [Source: The
Rockefellers]
To the amazement of the world,
Rockefeller’s punishment had in fact been his reward. Rather than being
taken down a peg, the splitting up of the Standard Oil monopoly had
launched him as the world’s only acknowledged billionaire at a time when
the average annual income in America was $520.
Rockefeller’s story was perfectly
mirrored by the story of Colonel Edwin Drake. Having struck oil in
Titusville and given rise to a billion dollar global industry, Drake had
not had the foresight to patent his drilling technique or even to buy up
the land around his own well. He ended up in poverty, relying on an
annuity from the state of Pennsylvania to scrape together a living and
dying in 1880.
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.
Part Two: Competition is a Sin
When asked how he could justify the
treachery and deceit with which he pursued the creation of the Standard
Oil monopoly, John D. Rockefeller is reputed to have said: “Competition
is a sin.” This is the mentality of the monopolist, and it is this
justification, framed as religious conviction, that drove the oiligarchs
to so ruthlessly eliminate anyone who would dare rise up as a pretender
to their throne.
Ironically, it was the competition
between the oiligarchs in the early 20th century that helped give rise
to an early external threat to their empire: alcohol fuel.
As historian Lyle Cummins has
noted of the period:
“The oil trust battles between
Rockefeller, the Rothschilds, the Nobels and Marcus Samuel’s Shell
kept prices in a state of flux, and engines often had to be
adaptable to the fuel that was available.”
In many areas where oil wasn’t
available, the alternative was alcohol. Ethyl alcohol had been used as a
fuel for lamps and engines since the early 19th century. Although it was
generally more expensive, alcohol fuel offered a stability of supply
that was alluring, especially in areas like London or Paris that did not
have predictable access to oil supplies.
Alcohol has a lower heat value, or BTU,
than gasoline, but a series
of tests by the US Geological Survey and the US Navy in 1907 and
1908 proved that the higher compression ratio of alcohol engines could
perfectly offset the lower heat value, thus making alcohol and gasoline
engines fuel economy equivalent.
One early supporter of alcohol fuel was
Henry Ford, who designed
his Model T to run on either alcohol or gasoline. Sensing an
opportunity for new markets to boost the independent American farms that
he felt were vital to the nation, Henry Ford told
the New York Times:
“The fuel of the future is going to
come from fruit like that sumach out by the road, or from apples,
weeds, sawdust – almost anything. There is fuel in every bit of
vegetable matter that can be fermented.”
Farmers, looking to capitalize on this,
lobbied for the repeal of a $2.08 per gallon alcohol tax that had been
imposed to help pay for the Civil War. They were aided by those who saw
fuel alcohol as a way to break the oiligarchs’ monopoly. In support of a
bill to repeal the alcohol tax, President Teddy Roosevelt told
the US Congress in 1906:
“The Standard Oil Company has,
largely by unfair or unlawful methods, crushed out home competition.
It is highly desirable that an element of competition should be
introduced by the passage of some such law as that which has already
passed the House, putting alcohol used in the arts and manufactures
upon the free list.”
The alcohol tax was repealed in 1906 and
for a time corn ethanol at 14 cents a gallon was cheaper than gasoline
at 22 cents a gallon. The promise of cheap, unpatentable,
unmonopolizable fuel production, production open to anyone with raw
vegetable matter and a still, swept the nation.
But cheap, plentiful fuel that can be
grown and produced locally and independently is not what the oiligarchs
had in mind.
A 1909
USGS report comparing gas and alcohol engines had noted that a
significant point in alcohol fuel’s favour was that there were fewer
restrictions on alcohol engines. For the oiligarchs, the answer was
simple: find a way to place greater restrictions on alcohol engines.
Thankfully for them, the answer to their problem was already gaining
popular support.
In the 19th century, America had a
drinking problem. By 1830, the average American over 15 years old drank seven
gallons of pure alcohol per year, three times higher than today’s
average. This led to the first anti-alcohol movements in the 1830s and
1840s, and the formation of the Prohibition Party in 1869 and the
Women’s Christian Temperance Union in the 1870s. The movement enjoyed
widespread and growing support but had few political successes; Maine
flirted with prohibition by outlawing
the sale and manufacture of liquor in 1851, but the ban only lasted
five years.
This changed with the formation of the
Anti-Saloon League in Standard Oil’s birth state of Ohio in 1893. The
ASL was started by John D. Rockefeller’s long-time
personal friend Howard Hyde Russell and was bankrolled in part by generous
annual donations from Rockefeller himself. The ASL, with
Rockefeller’s backing, quickly became the driving force behind a
national movement to outlaw the production and sale of alcohol.
Rockefeller was a teetotaler himself,
not from moral concern but because he was afraid that “good
cheer among friends” would lead to his downfall in business. Stephen
Harkness, one of the silent partner investors in Standard Oil and a
director in the company until his death, had caught
Rockefeller’s eye when he made a fortune buying up whiskey in
advance of a new excise tax that he had been tipped about and selling it
at a huge profit after the tax kicked in.
No, Rockefeller and Standard Oil were
not concerned about the moral state of the nation…except as far as it
impacted their bottom line. But when prohibition did come in 1920, it
had an interesting side effect: although it didn’t ban the use of
ethanol as a fuel directly, it did lead to increasingly
burdensome restrictions requiring producers to add petroleum
products to their ethanol to make it poisonous before it could be sold.
Alcohol fuel, now completely unable to compete with gasoline, was
abandoned altogether by the automobile industry.
Another existential threat to the vast
fortunes of the early oiligarchs was to require an even greater effort
at social engineering: public transportation.
By the end of World War I, private car
ownership was still a relative rarity; only one in 10 Americans owned a
car. Rail was still the transportation of choice for the vast majority
of the public, and city-dwellers in most major cities relied on electric
trolley networks to transport them around town. In 1936, General Motors
formed a front company, “National City Lines,” along with Firestone Tire
and Standard Oil of California, to implement a process of “bustitution”:
scrapping streetcars and tearing up railways to replace them with GM’s
own buses running on Standard Oil supplied diesel. The plan was
remarkably successful.
“By the end of the 1940s, GM had
bought and scrapped over one hundred municipal electric transit
systems in 45 cities and put gas-burning GM buses on the streets in
their place. By 1955 almost 90% of the electric streetcar lines in
the United States had been ripped out or otherwise eliminated.”
The cartel had been careful to hide
their involvement in National City Lines, but it was revealed to the
public in 1946 by an enterprising retired naval lieutenant commander,
Edwin J. Quinby. He wrote a
manifesto exposing what he called “a careful, deliberately planned
campaign to swindle you out of your most important and valuable public
utilities – your Electric Railway System.” 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.
Unsurprisingly, GM and its associates
did not remain in the doghouse for long. In 1953 President Eisenhower
appointed Charles Wilson, then the President of General Motors, as
Secretary of Defense. Wilson, with Francis DuPont of the
Rockefeller-connected DuPont family as Chief Administrator of Federal
Highways, oversaw one of the largest public works projects in American
history: the creation of the interstate highway system. With a war-era
excise tax on train tickets still in place and federally funded highways
and airports providing cheaper alternatives, rail travel declined
a startling 84% between 1945 and 1964.
This social engineering paid off well
for Standard Oil and its growing list of petrochemical associates. In
the two and a half decades after the outbreak of World War II, vehicle
production in Detroit almost tripled, from 4.5 million cars a year in
1940 to over 11 million in 1965. As a result, sales of refined gasoline
over the same period rose 300%.
But Rockefeller was not the only
oiligarch working to crush all opposition to his monopoly. Across the
pond, the European oiligarchs were working to protect their own oil
investments from upstart competitors.
In 1889, a consortium of German
investors led by Siemens’ Deutsche Bank obtained a concession from the
Turkish government for extension of a railway line connecting Berlin to
Basra on the Persian Gulf via Baghdad in what was then part of the
Ottoman Empire. The
Berlin-Baghdad Railway concession was for ninety-nine years and came
with mineral rights for twenty kilometers on either side of the line…an
especially lucrative deal since the rail cut right through the heart of
the still untapped Mesopotamian oil regions south of Mosul along the
Tigris River.
For the powers behind the British
empire, concerned with the military rise of Germany, this deal was
unacceptable. Explains historian and journalist William Engdahl:
“Well Germany in the end of the 19th
century was looking for outlets for its exports — its industrial
exports — as the German economy was growing like China’s has grown
in the last 30 years. And they decided that Turkey would be an ideal
strategic trade partner for Germany. And Georg von Siemens, one of
the directors of Deutsche Bank, came up with a strategy to extend a
railway from Berlin all the way down to Baghdad — which was then
part of the Ottoman Empire, Baghdad and Iraq today, near the Persian
Gulf. German military began training the Turkish military. German
industry began investing in Turkey. They saw a huge potential market
to begin bringing Turkey into the 20th century economically.
Deutsche Bank also negotiated mineral rights — I think it was 20
kilometres either side of the railway — and it was already known in
1914 that Mosul and these other areas contained huge petroleum
deposits.
“Well, why is that significant? At
the end of the 19th century, Jack Fisher–the head of the Admiralty
and the head of the Royal Navy–advocated the conversion of the
British Navy from coal-fired to oil-fired. That it would have a
qualitative strategic improvement in every aspect of warship design.
And since Britain didn’t know that they had any oil back then they
went to Persia and swindled the Shah out of oil rights in Persia.
They went to Kuwait and backed a coup d’etat of the Al-Sabah family
to be a British pawn, and they literally wrote a contract with him
that nothing that Kuwait does will be done without approval of the
British Governor. And Kuwait was known to have oil lying right on
the Persian Gulf.
“The British looked at this railway
plan of the Germans going right down to Baghdad and said ‘My God!
You can put soldiers on rail cars and bring them down and threaten
the oil lifeline of the British Navy.’ This is a strategic move by
the Germans. It also would make Germany independent of the British
control of the seas. They would have a landline much like the
Chinese “One Belt, One Road” infrastructure for high speed rails
going throughout Eurasia into Russia, on into Belarus and Western
Europe that removes the United States’ Navy ability to control China
and control Central Asia to a great extent.” ~ William Engdahl
The British oiligarchs, including the
British crown with its hidden
controlling stake in Anglo-Persian Oil and the Rothschild’s
merchant Marcus Samuel at Royal Dutch Shell, sought to counter this
German threat to their commercial and strategic interests. They used
Armenian-born naturalized British citizen Calouste Gulbenkian – the
architect of the Royal Dutch / Shell merger – in order, as he later
recalled “to see British influence get the upper hand in Turkey”
against the Germans. If that was his task, it was a remarkable success.
In 1909 the British set up the Turkish
National Bank, which was “Turkish” in name only. Founded by London
banker Sir Edward Cassel and with directors like Hugo Baring of the
Barings banking family, Cassel himself, and Gulbenkian, the Bank set up
the Turkish Petroleum Company in 1912. Formed explicitly to exploit the
petroleum-rich oil fields of Iraq, then part of the Ottoman Empire,
Gulbenkian brokered a deal that forced Deutsche Bank, with its 40
kilometre concessions along the oil-rich Baghdad railway line, into a
junior partnership in the company. The stock was split so the British
government’s Anglo-Persian Oil Company owned half the shares, with Royal
Dutch Shell and Deutsche Bank splitting the other half.
Their plan to take over Germany’s
Turkish oil interests had been successful, but in an amazing irony, it
didn’t even matter. Gulbenkian finished negotiations for the Iraqi oil
concession on
June 28, 1914, the same day Archduke Ferdinand was shot in Sarajevo.
An alliance the British had been brokering for years to constrain the
rising German threat, an alliance involving France and Russia, kicked
into motion and the world was engulfed in war. By the end of World War
I, the British and their allies had taken over Iraq and its oil deposits
anyway, Germany had been completely cut out, and Gulbenkian, their
scheming servant, received 5% of all oil field proceeds in the newly
minted country.
As the century wore on, the oil industry
grew beyond the control of the handful of families that had dominated it
since its inception. Oil deposits were located around the globe and the
resources of entire nation states were marshaled to control them. Now,
threats to the oiligarchs and their interests required multi-lateral,
multi-national responses and the consequences of those deals were felt
worldwide.
The story of the Oil Shock of 1973 as it
has been delivered to us by the history books is well known.
By the late 1960s the nation relied on
imported oil to keep the economy strong. Then in the early 1970s
oil-dependent America’s nightmares came true: 13 oil-producing countries
in the Middle East and South America formed OPEC, the Organization of
Petroleum Exporting Countries. In 1973 OPEC placed an oil embargo on the
US and other nations that had supported Israel against the Arab states
in the Yom Kippur war. The American economy went into a tailspin as gas
shortages gripped the nation. [Source: History
of Oil]
Few, however, know that the crisis and
its ensuing response was in fact prepared months ahead of time at a
secret meeting in Sweden in 1973. The meeting was the annual gathering
of the Bilderberg Group, a secretive cabal formed by Prince Bernhard of
the Netherlands in 1954.
The Dutch royal family not only gave its
royal imprint to Royal Dutch Petroleum, they are still rumoured
to be, along with the
Rothschilds, one of the largest shareholders in Royal Dutch Shell,
from the days when Queen Wilhelmina’s Anglo-Dutch Petroleum holdings and
other investments made her the world’s first
female billionaire right through to today. Bernhard’s guest list at
the Bilderberg Group reflected his position in the oiligarchy; alongside
him at the Swedish conference were David Rockefeller of the Standard Oil
dynasty and his protege Henry Kissinger, Baron Edmond de Rothschild,
E.G. Collado, the Vice President of Exxon, Sir Denis Greenhill, director
of British Petroleum, and Gerrit A. Wagner, president of Bernhard’s own
Royal Dutch Shell.
At the meeting in Sweden, held five
months before the oil crisis began, the oil-igarchs and their political
and business allies were planning their response to a monetary crisis
that threatened the world dominance of the US dollar. Under the Bretton
Woods system, negotiated in the final days of World War II, the US
dollar would be the backbone of the world monetary system, convertible
to gold at $35 per ounce with all other currencies pegged to it.
Increasing US expenditures in Vietnam and decreasing exports caused
Germany, France, and other nations to start demanding gold for their
dollars.
With the Federal Reserve’s official gold
holdings plunging and unable to stem the tide of demand, Nixon abandoned
Bretton Woods in August 1971, threatening the dollar’s position as the
world reserve currency.
“Accordingly, I have directed
the Secretary of the Treasury to take the action necessary to defend
the dollar against the speculators. I have directed
SecretaryConnally to suspend temporarily the convertability of the
dollar into gold or other reserve assets except in amounts and
conditions determined to be in the interest of monetary stability
and in the best interest of the United States.” ~ Richard
Nixon [Source: Nixon
Ends Bretton Woods]
As leaked documents from the 1973
Bilderberg meeting show, the oiligarchs decided to use their control
over the flow of oil to save the American hegemon.
Acknowleding that OPEC “could completely disorganize and undermine
the world monetary system,” the Bilderberg attendees prepared for “an
energy crisis or an increase in energy costs,” which, they
predicted, could mean an oil price between $10 and $12, a staggering
400% increase from the current price of $3.01 per barrel.
Five months later, Bilderberg attendee
and Rockefeller protege Henry Kissinger, acting as Nixon’s Secretary of
State, engineered
the Yom Kippur War and provoked OPEC’s response: an oil embargo of
the US and other nations that had supported Israel. On October 16, 1973,
OPEC raised oil prices by 70%. At their December meeting, the Shah of
Iran demanded and received a further price raise to $11.65 a barrel, or
400% of oil’s pre-crisis price. When asked by Saudi King Faisal’s
personal emissary why he had demanded such a bold price increase, he
replied: “Tell your King, if he wants the answer to this question,
he should go to Washington and ask Henry Kissinger.”
In the second move of the operation,
Kissinger helped negotiate a deal with Saudi Arabia: in exchange for US
arms and military protection, the Saudis would price all their future
oil sales in dollars and recycle those dollars through treasury
purchases via Wall Street banks. The deal was a bonanza for the
oiligarchs; not only did they get to pass the price increases on to the
consumers, but they benefited from the huge flows of money into their
own banks. The Shah of Iran parked the National Iranian Oil Company’s
revenues in Rockefeller’s own Chase Bank, revenues that reached $14
billion per year in the wake of the oil crisis.
With the creation of this new system,
the “petrodollar”,
the oiligarchs had reached unprecedented levels of control over the
economy. Not only that, they had backed the world monetary system with
their commodity, oil, and brought potential competition from upstart
producer nations under their control all in one step.
But for the insatiable appetites of
these monopolist titans, mere control over the world’s monetary system
was not enough…
Part Three: The World in Their Image
In the nineteenth century, railroad
conspiracies and predatory pricing had been enough to assure the
oiligarchs’ monopoly. But by the time that the British crown, the Dutch
royal family, the Rothschilds and the other European oiligarchs began
opening up the Middle East and the Far East to oil exploration in the
early twentieth century, the goal was no longer to maximize profits or
control the oil industry. It was not even to control international
diplomacy. It was to control and shape the world itself. Its resources.
Its environment. And its people.
In order to achieve this goal, the
oiligarchy would need a facelift.
In the current age, with the Rockefeller
name now more likely to be associated with Rockefeller Plaza or
Rockefeller University than Standard Oil, it is difficult to understand
just how hated John D. was in his own day. He was the head
of the Standard Oil Hydra, an octopus
strangling the world in his tentacles, a cutthroat
gardener pruning the competitors from the flower of his oil
monopoly. As one of the richest men the world had ever known, he was an
easy target for the average working man’s frustrations and a magnet for
the poor seeking help.
“He received on average 50 to 60,000
letters a month, asking for help. Dozens of people followed him in
the street. Literally, crowds stood around the Standard Oil offices
waiting for him to come out. Little children, painfully thin, crying
in the street and so on. Rockefeller felt overwhelmed.” ~ Judith
Sealander, Historian [Source: The
Rockefellers]
Besieged by the downtrodden, despised by
the working man, hounded by Ida Tarbell and the muckraking press, John
D. had the mother of all PR problems. The answer was simple: invent the
PR industry. He hired Ivy Ledbetter Lee, a
journalist-turned-communications expert who invented the modern public
relations industry to burnish the Rockefellers’ tarnished image. An
early master of public relations, Lee used the media which the
muckrakers had used to disgrace Rockefeller to turn him into a
sympathetic figure. Ivy Lee recognized early the power of the new moving
picture and used newsreels to show a remarkably benevolent
Rockefeller. It was Lee that suggested giving the family name to
Rockefeller Center and filming John D. handing out dimes in public. And,
as Ivy Lee began to control his public image, Rockefeller became oddly a
kind of American character, and people kind of warmed to him in a
bizarre sort of way.
These PR stunts seem obvious and
ham-handed by today’s standards, but they were effective enough: to this
day people leave dimes on the stone marker at the base of the 70 foot
Egyptian obelisk that towers over John D.’s final resting place in
Cleveland’s Lake View Cemetery. But it was not stage-managed photo
opportunities like these that transformed Rockefeller into a public
hero.
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 the 1840 census finding unsurprisingly that the United
States–a nation that had been mobilized by tracts like Thomas Paine’s
remarkably popular Common Sense–was a nation of readers, with a
remarkable 93% to 100% literacy rate. Before the first compulsory
schooling laws in Massachusetts in 1852, education was private and
decentralized, and as a result classical education, including study of
Greek and Latin and 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, an entire class of people whose
intellect was developed just enough to prepare them for lives of
drudgery in a factory. Into the midst stepped John D. Rockefeller with
his first great act of public charity: the establishment of the
University of Chicago.
He was aided in this task by Frederick
Taylor Gates, a Baptist minister that Rockefeller befriended in 1889 and
who would go on to be John D.’s most trusted philanthropic adviser.
Gates would go on to write a short tract, “The
Country School of Tomorrow,” that laid out the Rockefeller plan for
education:
“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.”
Although Rockefeller’s resources weren’t
exactly limitless, they might as well have been. In 1902 he established
the General Education Board to help implement Gates’ vision for the
country school of tomorrow with a staggering $180 million endowment.
The Rockefeller influence on education
was felt almost immediately, and it was amplified by help from fellow
monopolists of the era who were approaching the topic of philanthropy
from the same angle.
Although best known as a steel magnate,
Andrew Carnegie’s fortune started on the railroads transporting
Rockefeller’s Standard Oil around the country, and was greatly magnified
by a lucrative investment in property near Oil Creek that provided
steady, profitable oil sales. In 1905 he established the Carnegie
Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, a tax-free foundation
through which Carnegie and his appointees could direct the development
of the education system in the the United States, and, eventually,
worldwide. In 1910, Rockefeller followed suit by establishing the
Rockefeller Foundation, which became the tax-free umbrella organization
for his philanthropic ambitions.
As the Reece Committee–a Congressional
investigation into the activities of these tax-free foundations in the
1950s–discovered, it wasn’t long before Carnegie’s Endowment approached
Rockefeller’s Foundation with a proposal: to cooperate on their shared
desire to transform the American education system in their own image.
Norman Dodd, the director of research for the Congressional committee
who was granted access to the Carnegie Endowment’s board minutes,
explains:
So they approach the Rockefeller
Foundation with a suggestion: that portion of education which could be
considered domestic should be handled by the Rockefeller Foundation, and
that portion which is international should be handled by the Endowment.
They then decide that the key to the
success of these two operations lay in the alteration of the teaching of
American History. So, they approach four of the then most prominent
teachers of American History in the country — people like Charles and
Mary Byrd. Their suggestion to them is this, “Will they alter the manner
in which they present their subject”” And, they get turned down, flatly.
So, they then decide that it is
necessary for them to do as they say, i.e. “build our own
stable of historians.” Then, they approach the Guggenheim Foundation,
which specializes in fellowships, and say “When we find young men in the
process of studying for doctorates in the field of American History, and
we feel that they are the right caliber, will you grant them fellowships
on our say so? And the answer is, “Yes.”
So, under that condition, eventually
they assemble twenty (20), and they take these twenty potential teachers
of American History to London. There, they are briefed in what is
expected of them — when, as, and if they
secure appointments in keeping with the doctorates they will have
earned.
That group of twenty historians
ultimately becomes the nucleus of the American Historical Association.
And then, toward the end of the 1920’s, the Endowment grants to the
American Historical Association four hundred thousand dollars ($400,000)
for a study of our history in a manner which points to what this country
look forward to, in the future. That culminates in a seven-volume study,
the last volume of which is, of course, in essence, a summary of the
contents of the other six. The essence of the last volume is this: the
future of this country belongs to collectivism, administered with
characteristic American efficiency. [Source: Norman
Dodd interview.]
With this base for transformation firmly
established, the Rockefeller Foundation and like-minded organization
embarked on a program so ambitious that it almost defies
comprehension. They transformed the practice of medicine.
As usual, the oiligarchs that funded
this change were also there to profit from it, and once again John D.
took his queue from “Devil” Bill’s example. William Rockefeller had
called his brand of snake oil “Nujol,” for “new oil,” and Standard Oil spun
off “Nujol” as a laxative under their Stanco subsidiary.
Manufactured on the same premises as “Flit,” an insecticide also derived
from Standard Oil’s byproducts, “Nujol” sold at the druggist for 28
cents per six ounce bottle; it cost Standard Oil less than one-fifth of
a cent to manufacture. Pharmaceuticals provided a lucrative new
opportunity for the oiligarchs, but in a turn-of-the-century America
that was still largely based on naturopathic, herbal remedies, it was a
tough sell. The oiligarchy went to work changing that.
In 1901 John D. established the
Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. The Institute recruited
Simon Flexner, a pathology professor at the University of Pennsylvania,
to serve as its director. 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 takeover of the medical
industry was accomplished by the takeover of the medical schools.
Well, the people that we’re talking about, Rockefeller and Carnegie
in particular, came to the picture and said ‘We will put up money.’
They offered tremendous amounts of money to the schools that would
agree to cooperate with them. The donors said to the schools: ‘We’re
giving you all this money, now would it be too much to ask if we
could put some of our people on your Board of Directors to see that
our money is being spent wisely?’ Almost overnight all of the major
universities received large grants from these sources and also
accepted one, two or three of these people that I mentioned on their
Board of Directors and the schools literally were taken over by the
financial interests that put up the money.
“Now what happened as a result of
that is the schools did receive an infusion of money, they were able
to build new buildings, they were able to add expensive equipment to
their laboratories, they were able to hire top-notch teachers, but
at the same time as doing that they schewed the whole thing in the
direction of pharmaceutical drugs. That was the efficiency in
philanthropy.
“The doctors from that point forward
in history would be taught pharmaceutical drugs. All of the great
teaching institutions in America were captured by the pharmaceutical
interests in this fashion, and it’s amazing how little money it
really took to do it.” ~ G. Edward Griffin
[Source: The
Money Takeover Of Medicine.]
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.” It was Frank Howard, a Standard Oil of New Jersey executive, who
would go on to persuade Alfred Sloan and Charles Kettering to donate
their fortunes to the cancer center that would then bear their name. As director
of research at Sloan-Kettering, Howard appointed Cornelius
Rhoads, a Rockefeller Institute pathologist, to develop his wartime
research on mustard gas for the US Army into a new cancer therapy. Under
Rhoads’ leadership, nearly the entire program and staff of the Chemical
Warfare Service were reformed into the SKI drug development program,
where they worked on converting
mustard gas into chemotherapy. And once again, the Rockefeller’s own
snake oil was being sold as a cancer cure-all.
The oiligarchs’ interest in the
burgeoning pharmaceutical industry converged in companies like I.G.
Farben, a drug and chemical cartel formed in Germany in the early 20th
century. Royal Dutch’s Prince Bernhard served
on an I.G. Farben subsidiary’s board in the 1930s and the cartel’s
American operation, set up in cooperation with Standard Oil, included
on its board Standard Oil president Walter Teagle as well as Paul
Warburg of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., itself headed by Jacob Schiff of the
Rothschild broker family. At its height, I.G. Farben was the largest
chemical company in the world and the fourth largest industrial concern
in the world, right behind Standard Oil of New Jersey.
The company was broken up after World
War II, but like Standard Oil, its various pieces remained intact and
today BASF, one of its chemical offshoots, remains the largest
chemical company in the world, while Bayer and Sanofi, two of its
pharmaceutical offshoots are among the largest
pharmaceutical companies in the world.
Not content merely to monopolize the
fields of education and medicine, the same oiligarchical interests
banded together to take control of America’s finances. In 1910 John D.
Rockefeller Jr.’s own father-in-law, Senator Nelson Aldrich, Frank
Vanderlip of the National City Bank, and Paul Warburg, as well as
various agents of J.P. Morgan, met in complete secrecy on Jekyll Island
to hammer out the details of what would go on to become the Federal
Reserve, America’s central bank. The Fed, established in 1913, would be
run by hand-picked appointees of the oiligarchy and their banking
associates, including, perhaps inevitably, Standard Oil president and
American I.G. director Walter Teagle.
The Rockefeller family would go on to
formally enter the banking field in the 1950s when James Stillman
Rockefeller, the grandson of John D.’s brother, was appointed director
of National City Bank. Meanwhile John D.’s own grandson, David
Rockefeller, would go on to take over Chase Manhattan Bank, the
long-time banking partner of the Standard Oil empire.
In this move the Rockefellers’ story
perfectly mirrored that of their fellow oiligarchs the Rothschilds.
Whereas the Rothschilds had supplemented their banking fortune with
their oil interests, the Rockefellers supplemented their oil fortune
with banking interests.
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.
The Green Revolution began in 1943 when
plant geneticist Norman Borlaug and a team of researchers arrived on
Mexican soil. His goal was to improve agricultural techniques and
biotechnological methodologies which in turn would help alleviate
starvation and improve the living quality of developing nations.
Creating new genetically modified strains of wheat, rich, maize and
other crops, Borlaug planned to win the battle against world hunger. The
hope was that these new crops and farming techniques would rescue third
world countries from the brink of starvation.
That’s exactly what happened. The
agricultural innovations brought to the poverty-stricken countries gave
the farmers the skills and resources necessary to sustain themselves.
This triggered a chain of events that would allow these once-struggling
nations to survive. Agricultural exports soared in quantity and
diversity and allowed the countries to become self-sufficient.
As the genetically modified crops
thrived, farmers were able to use their increased income to purchase
newer and superior farming machinery. This increase in revenue made
farming easier, more reliable and more efficient. The Green Revolution
led to the modernization of agriculture and has had a profound social,
economic and political impact on the world. The Mexican government
turned to the Rockefeller Foundation in their endeavour to nourish
Mexico through agriculture. [Source: Green
Revolution Waging War Against Hunger.]
Norman Borlaug, needless to say, was a
researcher for the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Green Revolution, for
whatever increase in yields it brought about, also created markets for
the oiligarchs’ own interest in the petrochemical fertilizer industry
and gave rise to the “ABCD”
seed cartel of Archer Daniels Midand, Bunge, Cargill and Louis
Dreyfus. These companies, along with their associated interests in the
food packaging and processing industry, formed the core of American
“agribusiness,” a concept developed
at Harvard Business School in the 1950s with the help of research
conducted by Wassily Leontief for
the Rockefeller Foundation.
The American agribusiness giants shared
a common goal: the transformation of third world agriculture into a
captive market for their goods. From this perspective, the project was a
runaway success. By the 1970s the Rockefeller Standard Oil network and
its cronies in the nitrogen fertilizer industry (including DuPont, Dow
Chemical, and Hercules Powder) had broken into markets around the world,
markets conveniently forced open for them by the US government itself
under President Johnson’s “Food
for Peace” program, which mandated the use of
petrochemical-dependent agricultural technologies (fertilizers,
tractors, irrigation, etc.) by aid recipients.
Unable to afford these new technologies
themselves, the impoverished third-world “beneficiaries” of this
“revolution” relied on loans from the International Monetary Fund and
the World Bank handled by Rockefeller’s own Chase Manhattan Bank and
guaranteed by the US government.
The real costs of the Green Revolution,
economic, agricultural and environmental are seldom tallied. Access to
these debt-financed petrochemical-dependent technologies exacerbated the
difference between the rich landowning class and the landless peasants
in countries
like India, where land reform and abolition of usury were dropped
from the political agenda after the Green Revolution took over.
Even then, the revolution’s main
success, its increase in agricultural yields, has been oversold. Yield
growth across India actually
slowed after the introduction of agribusiness. The environmental
destruction is even more devastating. An overview in
the December 2000 edition of Current Science notes: “The gree n
revolution has not only increased productivity, but it has also
[produced] several negative ecological consequences such as depletion of
lands, decline in soil fertility, soil salinization, soil erosion,
deterioration of environment, health hazards, poor sustainability of
agricultural lands and degradation of biodiversity. Indiscriminate use
of pesticides, irrigation and imbalanced fertilization has threatened
sustainability.”
The Rockefeller Foundation even acknowledges the
critiques of the Green Revolution it funded into existence, insisting
that “current initiatives take into account lessons learned.” Even so,
the Foundation continues to fund research and write reports on
how to improve prospects for agribusiness investment in its target
markets.
As egregious as the Green Revolution was
and continues to be, however, in many ways it was just the prelude to an
even more ambitious project: the Gene Revolution. Now the project is not
merely to monopolize the technologies, supplies and chemical inputs for
agriculture worldwide, but to monopolize the food supply itself through
the replacement of the world’s natural seeds with patentable genetically
modified crops.
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 PlantScience
mingling with traditional oiligarch associate companies like Dow
AgroScience, DuPont Biotechnology, and, of course, Monsanto, all funded
by the Rockefeller Foundation and fellow “philanthropists” at the Ford
Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and like-minded
organizations.
The convergence of corporate,
“philanthropic,” governmental and inter-governmental interests in
promoting GM crops around the world can be seen in the bewildering array
of research institutes, industry associations, and “consultative groups”
devoted to the case. The Rockefeller-funded International
Rice Research Institute (IRRI), the Rockefeller/Monsanto/USAID
brainchildInternational Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech
Applications (ISAAA), the
Rockefeller/Ford/World Bank created Consultative Group of
International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and dozens of other bland,
benign-sounding organizations research and promote GM crops in target
markets around the globe, with the profits ending up in the oiligarchs’
coffers.
A representative example of this story
is the agribusiness neocolonization of Argentina, where Monsanto ran an
elaborate “bait-and-switch” to get the country hooked on its genetically
modified Roundup Ready soybeans before demanding
royalties on the crops that were by then already growing. DuPont
then took over, magnanimously beginning a “Protein for Life” programme
to foist
their own GM soybeans on the country’s poor.
The same scene has played itself out in
country after country, where cartel-developed GM crops are foisted on
emerging economies through “food aid,” usually during times of famine
when those countries are especially vulnerable. Only a handful of
countries like Zambia or Angola have
outright rejected this GMO takeover of their food supply, generously
subsidized by the US government to the benefit of the agribusiness
cartel.
Conclusion: Monopolizing Life
From cutthroat pioneers of the early oil
industry to Machiavellian social engineers and geopolitics schemers, the
oiligarchs have come a long way since the days of Devil Bill’s snake oil
cure-alls. But his use of every form of deception and trickery to
swindle the public informed how John D. and the rest of the oiligarchs
built up their business interests.
As the 20th century drew to a close, it
was obvious that for the powerful cartel that built the oil industry –
the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds, the British and Dutch royal families
– it was no longer about oil, if it ever really was. 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.
They had been remarkably, almost
unbelievably, successful. From oil well to gas pump, farm to fork,
hospital to pharmaceutical, drill rig to dollar bill, there was almost
no aspect of society that was not under control.
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 not about oil. It is not about
money. 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.
About the author:
James
Corbett is editor, webmaster, writer, producer, host, and the
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