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 effected 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
-
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"
-
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 oiligarchy.
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.
On August 28th, they strike oil.
Narrator:
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.
Daniel Yergin:
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.
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.
David Rockefeller:
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.
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.
Narrator:
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.'"
Ron Chernow,
Biographer: 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.
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 endeavor 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 (below image) as a colossus with bribed politicians literally
in the palm of his hand; Standard Oil was a
menacing octopus (above image) 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.
Narrator:
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.
Ron Chernow,
Biographer: 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."
Narrator:
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.
Ron Chernow,
Biographer: 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.
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 favor 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.
As historian and researcher F.
William Engdahl notes in "Myths,
Lies and Oil Wars"
"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.
Quinby's warning caught the
attention of federal prosecutors and in 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.
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.
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 kilometers 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.
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.
Narrator:
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
rumored 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 protégé Henry Kissinger
-
Baron Edmond de Rothschild
-
E.G. Collado, the Vice
President of Exxon
-
Sir Denis Greenhill,
director of British Petroleum
-
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.
Richard Nixon:
Accordingly, I have directed
the Secretary of the Treasury to take the action necessary
to defend the dollar against the speculators.
I have directed Secretary
Connally to suspend
temporarily the convertibility 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.
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 protégé
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 (above image) in his tentacles, a
cutthroat gardener (below image) 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.
Judith Sealander,
Historian: 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.
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.
It was Lee that suggested giving the
family name to Rockefeller Center and filming John D. handing
out dimes in public.
Narrator:
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.
John D.
Rockefeller: I am very
grateful to you and to a host of people who are so kind and
good to me all the time.
Second Man:
Why, because you're so good to everybody.
John D.
Rockefeller: Yes, you are.
As Ivy Lee began to control his
public image he became oddly a kind of American character,
and people kind of warmed to him in a bizarre sort of way.
It was like having Frankenstein on the loose walking around
New York City or something like that, with a cane and a long
hat.
Narrator:
Although this plane never takes off,
this photo opportunity was presented as Senior's first
flight. Perhaps Ivy Lee's most brilliant public relations
move was the casting of Rockefeller as 'The Man Who Gave out
Dimes.'
Man off camera:
Don't you give dimes, Mr. Rockefeller? Please, go ahead.
Woman:
Thank you, sir.
Man:
Thank you very much.
John D.
Rockefeller: Thank you for
the ride!
Man:
I consider myself more than amply paid.
John D.
Rockefeller: Bless you! Bless
you! Bless you!
SOURCE:
John D. Rockefeller - Standard Oil
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.
Narrator:
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.
G. Edward Griffin:
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.
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.
Narrator:
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,
...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" program 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,
...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.
