I've decided to repost these articles in their entirety here to showcase them in another webspace. For charts and pictures, and for the links, including updated links at the end of each article, please go to the webpages.
The information about Gore is surprising to me. Did he have a "Road to Damascus" moment, when he realized how oil and coal are destroying our planet - why was he still in league with Big Oil as late as 2000? I'm not going to stop supporting him in his anti-global warming efforts, now, of course, but I'd like to hear his explanations about the information presented in part 2.
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http://www.hermes-press.com/oilrulers1.htm
The World Plutocracy
Part I:
Oil Rulers
"The trouble with this country is that you can't win an election without the oil bloc, and you can't govern with it."
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Plutocracy is that form of government in which, instead of the people being represented by their elected officials, those with wealth "buy" the officials. Those officials then create laws and policies which produce obscene profits for the wealthy owners of corporations.
Beginning in the nineteenth century with the Rockefeller monopoly, persons of wealth and political power decided that the energy of choice for the world would be oil (not coal)--just as the drugs of choice would be alcohol and tobacco. They set out to control the world's oil reserves.
British Petroleum (earlier Anglo-Persian and then Anglo-Iranian Oil Company) was started by William Knox D'Arcy in 1901 when he bought a concession from the Grand Vizier in Teheran for 480,000 square miles (nearly twice the size of Texas) in exchange for twenty thousand pounds in cash, twenty thousand one pound shares, and sixteen percent of the net profits. After three years of drilling and finding no oil, D'Arcy convinced the Burmah Oil Company to put up the extra capital needed to keep D'Arcy's venture afloat. After another two years of drilling they finally struck oil and Burmah Oil and D'Arcy formed the new Anglo-Persian Oil Company. In 1914, three months before the start of World War I, the British government, through the insistence of Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, bought 51 percent of Anglo-Persian for two million pounds, stipulating that the company must always remain an independent British concern and that every director must be a British subject. The British navy had converted to oil (from coal) in 1910 and during World War I, Britain needed more oil than the Anglo-Persian Company could supply. The remainder was purchased from Royal Dutch Shell.
Oil Wars
In the early part of the twentieth century, there was fierce rivalry between the three largest oil companies: Shell, Exxon, and British Petroleum.
* Henri Deterding, head of Shell, bought:
o oilfields in Egypt (In 1908)
o the Russsian Ural-Caspian oilfields (1910)
o Mexican oilfields belonging to Lord Cowdray (Weetman Pearson)
o Venezualan oilfields (which still produce a sixth of Shell's supplies)
o American oilfields
* Walter Teagle, head of Exxon
o secretly bought a prosperous Texas oil company misleadingly named Humble (1919)
o secretly bought out the Nobels' Russian oil interests for $11.5 million (1920)--though the new communist regime seized the oilfields and paid Exxon nothing
* British Petroleum
o BP controlled not only Iran (Anglo-Persian Oil Company) but a quarter of the oil from the Iraq Petroleum Company. The Iraq Petroleum Company (earlier called the Turkish Petroleum Company) was formed following the first world war, composed of British Petroleum (BP), Exxon, Gulf, Texaco, Mobil, and Calouste Gulbenkian, an Armenian entrepreneur.
In 1928, Teagle (Exxon), Deterding (Shell), and Sir John Cadman (BP) met in Achnacarry Castle in Scotland. They agreed on a price-fixing scheme that would stop the cutthroat competition that had been harmful to all of them. These three oil rulers controlled the pricing and supply of oil worldwide.
However, a huge new oilfield first drilled in Kilgore, Texas, released a gush of oil, resulting in the price of crude falling to ten cents a barrel. H.L. Hunt bought out the original Kilgore wildcat driller, "Dad Joiner." Hunt became a billionaire, the richest of all the Texans. But the problem of oversupply was so devastatinig that the governors of Texas and Oklahoma called in the national guard and closed down oilfields, enforcing a system of rationing by which the demand in a particualr month was shared among oil producers by a state body called the Texas Railroad Commission.
In 1926 Exxon signed an agreement with the German chemical combine, I.G. Farben, for an exchange of patents and research: Farben was to stay out of the oil business and Exxon would stay out of the chemical business. The agreement gave Nazi Germany hundred-octane avation fuel and synthetic rubber. Exxon held back the research in synthetic rubber in the U.S. In 1941 the Justice Department bought two antitrust suits against Exxon: for conspiring to control oil transportation through pipelines and for making restrictive agreements with I.G. Farben. Exxon was forced to pay a fine of $50,000.
The U.S. was now involved in the second World War and Japan had just seized the Malayan rubber plantations, from which America had earlier derived its supply of rubber. Senator Harry Truman claimed that Exxon's failure to pursue synthetic rubber research in the U.S., while developing it in collaboration with the Germans, constituted treason.
Texaco, under the direction of its swashbuckling president, Torkild Rieber, provided six million dollars worth of oil to Franco, the Spanish dictator. Rieber also made contact through Spain with leading Nazis and agreed to supply oil from Colombia to Germany. Texaco continued to supply oil to Nazi Germany even after the outbreak of the World War II in 1939, receiving as payment three Hamburg tankers. Rieber sealed the deal with Goering in Berlin. At Goering's insistence, Rieber put forward a peace plan to Franklin D. Roosevelt which would ensure Britain's surrender. Roosevelt told Rieber to get out of his dealings with Nazi Germany. Rieber ignored Roosevelt and financed the propaganda mission of Dr. Gerhardt Wesrick, a German lawyer, to dissuade American businessmen from suplying Britain with arms. The head of British Intelligence in New York, the Canadian millionaire William Stephenson, learned of the Westrick fiasco and broke the story to the New York Herald Tribune. Westrick was forced to return to Germany on a Japanese ship. Rieber was discredited and Texaco shares plummeted.
"An honest and scupulous man in the oil business is so rare as to rank as a museum piece."
Harold Ickes, U.S. Petroleum Administrator for War during World War II
Mexican oil was essentially controlled by a Britisher, Weetman Pearson, later to be titled Lord Cowdray. He began as early as 1901 to buy concessions in Mexico and by 1918 he was one of the richest men in the world, the nearest British equivalent to the American Rockefeller. His fortune laid the foundation for Lazards Bank, the Financial Times, The Economist, Longmans and Penguin Books. In 1919, Cowdray sold out the majority of his company to Deterding of Shell. In 1938, Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas nationalized the seventeen foreign-owned oil companies and a monument to the nationalized company, PEMEX, was erected in Mexico City, at which diplomats were required to place wreaths. The American, Dutch, and British oil companies boycotted the nationalized Mexican oil interests and the incompetently-run PEMEX was eventually forced to pay $130 million in compensation for seizing the companies. During the second world war, the big oil companies drained off much of Mexico's oil reserves, then switched their attention to Venzuela where they were in league with Gomez, the dictator.
Meanwhile, in the Middle-East
In 1926, King Ibn Saud, the Muslim desert warrior, had conquered his rivals in Mecca and the Hejaz and named the whole territory, from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea, Saudi Arabia, the only country to be named after its ruling family. One of King Saud's principal advisors was Harry St. John Philby, the Arabist who had quit the British Colonial Service out of disaffection. Philby had become a Muslim and was close to Saud. King Saud needed money to finance his enterprises and Philby suggested that he exploit his land's oil resources. Philby assisted Socal in getting the concession in 1933. King Saud received an immediate loan of thirty thousand pounds, with another twenty thousand pounds eighteen months later, and an annual rent of five thousand pounds, all in gold. Socal paid Philby a salary of one thousand pounds a year.
Socal, short of capital and market outlets, sold half of its Saudi and Bahrain concession to Texaco's Cap Rieber. The joint venture was called Aramco. In May, 1939, King Saud turned the valve on the pipeline and the oil began to flow. Saud was so delighted with the money and gifts he received from Socal and Texaco that he increased the size of the concession to 444,000 square miles, a plot the size of Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and New Mexico combined.
Kuwait, one of many small independent sheikhdoms which had cut into the land mass of Saudi Arabia, had also discovered oil and the concession was purchased by Gulf in 1927 for $50,000. In 1934 Gulf and BP signed an agreement with the Kuwaiti sheikh in a joint venture and huge reserves were discovered in 1938.
During World War II, Britain advanced about twenty million dollars to King Saud to bribe him to renege on the Socal/Texaco concession and go with BP. Socal and Texaco appealed to Washington and Roosevelt sent lend-lease money to Saudi Arabia. Roosevelt and his advisors decided that the United States should have a controlling interest in Aramco, to protect the nation's oil interests. In 1943, Roosevelt authorized the formation of a new corporation to acquire a hundred percent of Aramco.
Harold Ickes, petroleum administrator for War and Secretary of the Interior, was president of the new corporation, the secretaries of State, War, and the Navy among the directors and Abe Fortas as secretary. Aramco would not immediately agree to sell its concession to the new federal corporation, so Ickes said the corporation would build a thousand-mile pipeline to carry Saudi Arabian oil to the Mediterranean. In return, Aramco would guarantee twenty percent of their oilfields as a naval reserve which would be available to the navy at a cut rate. In the end, after much political bickering in the U.S. and internationally, Texaco and Socal built the pipeline themselves, creating the Trans-Arabian Pipeline Company (Tapline). It was not until 1949 that Syria and Lebanon agreed to let the pipeline be built at a cost of $200 million. Over the years, the pipeline was a target for guerrillas, a focus for boycotts, and a bargaining chip for Syria against America. In 1975 it was shut down.
In 1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt promised King Saud that the United States would not change its policy regarding Palestine--and a Jewish state --without consulting the Arabs. However, Harry Truman became U.S. President two months later and gave full support to the establishment of the new state of Israel. Socal and Texaco worried about the political climate in Saudi Arabia. They decided to bring two other American oil companies into Aramco, Exxon (30%) and Mobil (10%).
King Saud continued to demand more money and finally in 1950 the U.S. State Department and Aramco agreed on a scheme whereby the money Aramco gave King Saud would be deducted from the company's tax bill, thus depriving the U.S. Treasury of $50 million or more in taxes each year. Under the U.S. tax laws establishing double taxation, the oil companies would not be taxed inside the United States. All the major oil companies adopted the same tax dodge so that by 1973 the five largest companies were making two-thirds of their profits abroad and paying no U.S. taxes on those earnings. This arrangement allowed oil companies to pay lower U.S. taxes than any group of industries. The United States had essentially turned into a country operated for the profit of the oil rulers.
Reza Shah seized power in Iran in 1921and soon took on the trappings of the Persian Peacock Throne. In 1941, when Hitler invaded Russia, the Shah refused to expel his Nazi allies, so the British and Russian armies invaded Iran to ensure oil and supply routes. The Shah was exiled to South Africa, where he died. During the war, Britain and Russia ruled, but at the end of World War II, the old Shah's twenty-one year old son was placed in power. Iran, like most oil-producing countries, resented the power its foreign-owned oil company wielded over it. A shrewd older politician, Dr. Mossadeq, was appointed chairman of a committee on Iranian oil policy. By 1951, Mossadeq was calling for nationalization and when he was elected prime minister by the Iranian parliament, Iran immediately seized BP's oilfields.
Iran was placed under international boycott by BP. When a Panamanian ship, the Rose Mary, took on oil from Abadan, RAF planes forced it into Aden harbor and impounded its cargo. American oil companies joined the BP boycott of Iran. However, President Truman and the Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, were appalled by the naked imperialism of Britain and when Mossadeq came to America to plead his case to the UN Security Council, Acheson befriended him.
However, antitrust fever had again overtaken the U.S. In 1952, the Senate Select Committee on Small Business released a report aptly titled "The International Petroleum Cartel." The report showed that the seven largest oil companies, nicknamed the Seven Sisters, controlled the majority of the oil-producing areas outside the United States, all foreign refineries, divided the world markets between them, shared pipelines and tankers between themselves, and fixed oil prices worldwide. But Eisenhower became President and John Foster Dulles was appointed Secretary of State, with the result that the oil cartel was forgotten and the new foreign policy mythology became anti-communism.
In 1953, the CIA, with British support, began a subversive action against Mossadeq. Mossadeq had taken control over the Iranian army. The Shah tried to oust him, failed, and was forced to flee the country. The CIA coup, led by the CIA's Kermit Roosevelt, spending about $700,000, forced Mossadeq out of office and the Shah returned to Teheran triumphant. British and American oil companies formed an international consortium to buy and develop Iranian oil. BP received 40% of the shares of the consortium, the five American sisters each got 8%, Shell received 14%, and CFP (Compaignie Francaise de Petrole) 6 percent. The oil cartel members congratulated themselves that they had shown the world that no puny nation, such as Iran or Mexico, could seize their assets and long flourish.
OPEC
In 1961 the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) was established with members: Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela. Since that beginning, the following countries have attained membership: Qatar (1961), Indonesia and Libya (1962), Abu Dhabi (1967), United Arab Emirates (1974), Algeria (1969), Nigeria (1971), Ecuador (1973), and Gabon (1975). Their headquarters, originally located in Geneva, moved to Vienna in 1965. Policy is determined by delegates from members countries, which meet at least twice a year.
From the beginning of the oil energy monopoly there have been other sources of energy that are more abundant, more environment-friendly, and vastly cheaper. Steam-driven vehicles proved efficient but they were driven out by gasoline-driven vehicles. Since railway engines require less fuel than automobiles and trucks, they have been allowed to fall into disrepair, the decrepit U.S. railway infrastructure now producing frequent calamities.
World oil prices are currently high because OPEC and the American and British oil companies manipulate the prices to gain the highest profits possible. It actually costs only about $1 per barrel to pump oil from the ground, but the present price is $26.41 per barrel. If the market demand for oil products were allowed to operate independently, gas prices at the pump could drop by 50 percent at least.
In 1973, OPEC raised oil prices by 70 percent as a political warfare tactic aimed at western nations supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur War of October, 1973. That same year, in December, prices were hiked another 130 percent and a temporary embargo was placed on oil shipments to the United States and The Netherlands.
By the early 1980s, however, OPEC's influence began to wane as Western oil corporations discovered new sources of oil and began to use political and subversive pressure to force OPEC to cut back production to keep prices artificially high. OPEC's power has been decimated by internal conflicts and the Iran-Iraq war that broke out in 1980. Within the last several months, the U.S. has again warned OPEC about its raising prices by threatening to open up our national strategic oil reserves. The U.S. and British oil corporations insist on being the only ones to manipulate the price of oil.
The Gulf War was perpetrated by British and U.S. rulers to:
* Warn Japan and the European countries (especially Germany) that the U.S. controls the world's oil supply (by armed force if necessary)
* Control Iraq's oil production through the embargo resulting from the war
* Conquer Iraq since it threatens Israel's military hegemony in the Middle-East
Even though Iraq is under an embargo at present, it's estimated that Iraq ships approximately 100,000 barrels of illicit oil (in excess of the U.N.-approved export quota) per day. At the end of the U.S. rulers' war against Serbia in Bosnia and Kosovo, an embargo was slapped on Serbia. However, recently Serbia has been receiving blackmarket oil from Russia. That's why U.S. Navy SEALs recently boarded a Russian ship in the Gulf of Oman: to warn the Russians not to continue selling oil to Serbia.
The world oil cartel continues to fix gasoline prices worldwide. As this article is being written, for example, prices in California have skyrocketed. During the past year, world crude oil prices have increased by approximately 340%. The April 1999 decision by OPEC to cut production quotas contributes to the hyperinflation of oil prices, but it's only a part of the problem. OPEC now produces about 40% of the world's oil supply.
The real cause of the current rise in price for oil is that speculators are now moving into what are called hard commodities: energy, base metals, and food. On March 8, 2000, Iranian Oil Minister, Bijan Namdar Zanganeh, pointed out in a speech on Iran State TV that speculation, rather than physical shortages in crude oil, lay behind the current surge in oil prices.
This series deals with plutocracy, the rule of a nation by those with wealth. Plutocrats deal in all sectors of the economy, oil as well as all others. Currently these plutocratic speculators are making billions of dollars through their Wall Street scam, primarily in the technology stocks which are being artificially inflated beyond any relation to the real value of the companies offering the stocks.
For example, in February, 2000, Bloomberg News reported that the stock of the $23 million Internet company NetJ.com, which went public in November, 1999, had doubled in share price to nearly $4. This occurred despite the fact that the company plainly disclosed in documents submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission that it not only had no profits but no revenues and in fact that it did no business of any kind. The documents indicated that NetJ.com might begin doing business soon, but perhaps not. If it did begin doing business, it had no specific idea what kind of work it would do.
Along with their hyperinflationary speculation in the markets, oil corporations continue to buy politicians, resulting in Oil Rulers dominating every nation in the world.
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http://www.hermes-press.com/oilupdate.htm
Big Oil Rulers
Part Two
The Big Oil cartel connected with the Bush family is gambling billions in the Caucasus--not their own money, of course, but taxpayer subsidies--to strike it rich in the Caspian oil fields. These oil companies and their subsidiaries make money by creating new regional wars to which American troops are sent, with transportation and weaponry systems supplied by the same complex of corporations. Naturally, these ventures will be paid for by American taxpayers, with our money and the lives of our sons and daughters, while obscene profits will be realized by the oil rulers.
Now that Dubya got into office through a coup d'etat, having raised the largest campaign war chest in American history from these very same oil and defense industry interests, the oil cartel will have an even tighter death grip on the United States. These corporations consider the Bush campaign an investment, looking to a huge payoff from the profits of the biggest oil bonanza in history. Now that Bush has made it to the White House, a new Cold War era is almost guaranteed.
As George Bush Sr.'s hitman for the Gulf War, Dick Cheney bullied and coerced the middle-eastern countries into supporting Bush's War for Oil. As the senior Bush's Secretary of Defense, Cheney high-pressured Saudi Arabian officials in August 1990 after Iraq had invaded Kuwait. The Saudi monarchy, which maintains its power with the aid of U.S. weaponry, agreed to cooperate after Cheney claimed Iraq planned to attack the country's border.
Cheney led similar missions to Egypt, Morocco and other Middle Eastern and North African countries to coerce military cooperation. Without this arm-twisting, the U.S. military would have faced much stiffer opposition to its war on Iraq.
The 1991 Gulf War devastated Iraq's people and infrastructure, causing enormous social and personal difficulties.
However, Bush Sr., Cheney and the Republicans didn't act alone in these war crimes. Democrats in both the Senate and the House gave the war their blessing on January 12, 1991.
The Clinton-Gore administration carried out aerial bombardments on Iraq every week and the Democrats were heavily involved in the deadly sanctions against Iraq. On Aug. 2, 1990--before a single bomb was dropped or artillery shell fired at Iraq--"liberal Democratic" U.S. Senators George Mitchell, Edward Kennedy and Joseph Biden stood next to right wingers Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms to sponsor a resolution urging "a full economic blockade against Iraq."
Democrats and Republicans alike continue to support this genocidal policy. Sanctions have taken a terrible toll on the Iraqi people. At least 1.5 million people, mostly children under 5, have died as a result of the U.S.-imposed United Nations sanctions. Five thousand more perish each month.
Cheney later became CEO of the Dallas-based Halliburton Company, which over a five year period paid him a whopping $65 million in salary and stock options. Halliburton gave Cheney a $20 million farewell package when he became the Republican Vice Presidential nominee.
Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, continues to enrich itself from the decision made by Cheney at the Pentagon to privatize the military's logistical support facilities. Brown and Root were given lucrative Pentagon contracts in Kuwait and throughout the world exceeding $3.8 billion a year. Joe Lopez, Cheney's aide in the Defense Department, is now chief operating officer of Brown and Root.
Of the two candidates, Dubya is decidedly the choice of Big Oil.
Gore's connection to Big Oil and Big Money is no less notorious than Dubya's. His father, longtime Tennessee Senator Al Gore, Sr., maintained close relations with the infamous international wheeler-dealer and Kremlin favorite, Dr. Armand Hammer. In his book Dossier, Edward Jay Epstein maintained that Gore senior was Hammer's principal contact among the Democrats in the House. In 1950, Hammer made Congressman Gore a partner in a cattle-breeding business, from which Gore made a substantial profit. Hammer was Gore Sr.'s guest at five presidential inaugurations, including that of John F. Kennedy. Senator Al Gore, Jr. invited Hammer to be his guest at Ronald Reagan's inauguration.
When Gore Sr. was defeated for reelection to the Senate in 1970, after 32 years in Congress, Hammer appointed Gore president of Island Creek Coal, the nation's third largest coal producer and made Gore a vice president of Occidental Petroleum with a hefty $500,000 annual salary.
Gore Sr. was a very effective lackey:
* arranging for President Kennedy to give Hammer his official approval for Hammer to travel to the Soviet Union where he met Soviet leader, Nikita Krushchev
* defending Hammer, on the floor of the Senate, against accusations of attempted bribery
* writing a letter of introduction to the American ambassador in Libya, asking the ambassador to arrange a meeting between Hammer and King Idris I of Libya
* accompanying Hammer to Libya when Hammer's Libyan oil pipeline opened operations.
Al Jr.'s Russian Connection
Junior struck up backroom alliances with Russian financial gangsters such as Viktor Chernomyrdin, who turned Russia's huge energy reserves into corrupt personal fiefdoms after the collapse of the Soviet regime. With Gore's support, Chernomyrdin became prime minister of the Russian Federation.
Chernomyrdin and his cohorts--backed by the Russian Mafia--stole Russia's natural resources such as oil, gold, timber and daimonds, hawking them on the black market in Russia and abroad. The proceeds were stashed in numbered bank accounts all over Western europe.
An equal opportunity scoundrel, Al Jr. became the "Solicitor General" for the 1996 Democratic campaign, dunning Big Money contributors at home and abroad, especially China. Al barely escaped indictment with some fancy verbal footwork: "I didn't do anything wrong and I won't do it again."
The Clinton/Gore administration has now decided to tap into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. This is a key strategy in the Gore campaign:
* Bush is tied into foreign oil and any use of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve lowers the price of foreign oil
* U.S. voters are fed up with high gasoline prices and Gore may be seen as the good guy who lowered those prices
Energy Secretary Bill Richardson maintained that "this is not political," as he announced the release of 30 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve over the next 30 days. It was no accident that Gore was campaigning in Vanport, PA when Richardson made the announcement. Vanport is one of many U.S. communities where the price of heating oil has doubled within a year. When a member of the audience said that since Bush was a "big oilman" he "isn't going to do too much" about rising oil prices, Gore merely said, "No comment."
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The New U.S.-British
Oil Imperialism
By
Norman D. Livergood
The U.S. invasion of Iraq to loot its oil and politically restructure the Middle East, is part of a policy of military imperialism that the American and British ruling circles have been engaged in for several centuries. The American revolution was fought to bring the United States under new, non-British rulers, with the new regime sold to the public as a democracy. Beginning in the twentieth century, these American ruling elites have revolved around the Rockefeller, Brown, Harriman, and Morgan family dynasties. The Bush family, beginning with Prescott Bush, have served as satraps of the Rockefeller, Brown, and Harriman interests.
As we've seen, in earlier articles on these imperialistic rulers (Part 1, Part 2), the British and American ruling cabal decided that the energy of choice for the world would be oil and natural gas (not coal)--just as the drugs of choice would be alcohol and tobacco.
To overcome the problem of his oil holdings being broken apart by the U.S. government in 1911, John Rockefeller set out to control the world's energy reserves. World War I was the strategy of the world oil cartel (Standard, Shell, British Petroleum) to take over the colonies of France, Holland, Spain and Portugal. The engines of war now ran on petroleum-based products, so ownership of oil could determine who won or lost a war--therefore who would rule the world. Oil, instead of gold, became the token of power.
By 1919, the Oil Empire, not based on countries or nations, but on private corporations, ruled the world.
The Big Three oil cartel, which controlled oil in the Persian Gulf and southeast Asia areas, wanted to gain control over the vast oil reserves in the southern part of the Soviet Union. They financed the fascist regimes in Germany, Italy, and Japan with the hope that they would invade and control Russia. The Oil Rulers planned to defeat the German, Italian, and Japanese regimes and take control of the oil reserves in the Soviet Union. The Rockefeller circle also planned to take control of Persian Gulf oil from the British-Persian Oil cartel and seize control of southeast Asian oil from Royal Dutch Shell.
The United States was brought into the second world war when in July 1941, President Roosevelt signed an embargo to stop all shipping to Japan. This was said to be in retaliation for the Japanese invasion of French Indo-China. Roosevelt's U.S. embargo cut off the Japanese oil supply, which would have quickly shut down Japan's entire economy. In late November 1941 the Japanese sent a written "war warning" through diplomatic channels to Washington, demanding that the embargo be stopped, or else American sites in the Pacific would be attacked in retaliation. That formal diplomatic warning was ignored and the U.S. made no reply. Just two weeks later the Japanese bombed the American embargo ships located in Pearl Harbor.
In 1939 and '40, the Germans and Italians did not attack Russia as the Big Three had planned. Instead, German General Rommel rushed across North Africa to grab the Suez Canal and control all oil shipping through the canal. Rommel then planned to drive through to Persia and toss out the British from the British-Persian oil fields. Meanwhile, after a failed attack on Russia in 1939, the Japanese swept through Southeast Asia and seized all the oil holdings of Royal Dutch Shell. With the defeat of Japan in 1945, most of those Royal Dutch fields came under the control of Rockefeller's Standard Oil.
Hitler had planned to capture the oil fields in Romania by 1939 so Germany would have its own supply of oil. This was accomplished. Then Rommel was to have captured the oil fields in Persia by 1941, the oil fields in Russia in 1942. Only then would Hitler have sufficient fuel for prosecuting a war with the United States. But less than a week after the Pearl Harbor attack, the Japanese convinced Hitler to declare war on the United States. Hitler agreed only if the Japanese would attack Russia, since German troops were now bogged down in Russia and Hitler would gain strategic advantage if the Russians had to defend themselves from Japan on their eastern flank. When the Japanese failed to attack Russia, Hitler was driven out of Russia and now was without a fuel source. The Romanian oil fields in Ploesti were insufficient for Germany to carry on a war on two fronts, and Germany's war effort began to collapse.
The last major German campaign was the Battle of the Bulge, in which Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt was to attack the invading allies with his tanks, then capture the Allied fuel dumps. This would stop the American and British forces and obtain the necessary fuel for Germany to continue its war effort. But General Eisenhower ordered the Allied fuel dumps burned and Germany was defeated.
At the end of World War II, the British-Persian Oil Company controlled the vast oil fields in Iran. The Persians had declared their alignment with Adolf Hitler's Nazi "Aryan Race" movement and were fully expecting German General Rommel to come rushing across Africa and "free" them from the British. They had even proclaimed their alignment with Hitler by changing the name of their country from Persia to "Aryan," (or "Iran" in the Farsi language), but the Germans failed to save them.
To take control of Persian Gulf oil from the British, in 1954 Kermit Roosevelt, nephew of Franklin, led an American CIA coup to take control of Iran and place in power the American-backed Shah of Iran. The Shah expelled the British, and Rockefeller's Standard Oil now had control of the British-Persian petroleum fields.
In the early 1950s, Occidental Petroleum's Armand Hammer, a satrap of the Rockefellers, negotiated a deal with Russian dictator Joseph Stalin to buy his oil--thus effectively stealing it from the Russian people. Russian oil was then sold on the world market at a much higher price than Stalin could get by marketing it himself, because few countries were willing to buy oil from Stalin.
Occidental Petroleum and Russia built two large pipelines, from the Russian oil fields down along both sides of the Caspian Sea, terminating in the old British-Persian--now Standard Oil--oil fields in Iran. For the next 45 years, Russia secretly sent its oil out through those pipelines and Standard Oil sold the oil on the world market at the "West Texas Crude" price by calling it Iranian oil. For almost fifty yeas most Americans have been using Russian oil in their cars.
Standard Oil refineries, which produce gasoline from crude oil, are located at large sea ports like San Francisco, Houston or Los Angeles, not near any of the large American oil fields. Most oil from the Persian Gulf is shipped in oil tankers to those large American refinery-ports.
In 1979, the Standard Oil-backed Shah of Iran was thrown out by a British-backed coup and the long-time British asset, Ayatollah Khomeni, put into power. The flow of Russian oil through Iran suddenly stopped. Other oil pipelines were constructed through Iraq and Turkey. The Russian oil was now called OPEC Arabian-Middle Eastern oil and marketed at the even higher "spot market" price. So in 1979, in America and Europe, we suddenly experienced gasoline shortages and huge increases in the price of gasoline. Also in 1979 Standard Oil-Russian oil interests tried to secure an alternate, short, safe oil pipeline route from Russia through neighboring Afghanistan, but this only resulted in a prolonged war and the project was abandoned.
When the new British-controlled regime in Iran came into power, the Rockefeller-influenced U.S. government immediately threatened to seize $7.9 billion of Iranian assets located in the U.S. On November 4, 1979 Iranian "terrorists" captured and held hostage 65 Americans. Essentially, Standard Oil was being blackmailed by the hostage strategy. After lengthy negotiations, the Rockefeller-created President Jimmy Carter approved the electronic transfer of 7.9 billion dollars from U.S. accounts to the Iranian regime on January 20, 1981.
On Wednesday January 27, 1988, as announced in the Wall Street Journal, Standard Oil merged with British Petroleum. This actually represents Standard Oil's buyout of British Petroleum, the name of the newly merged company being BP-America. The Wall Street Journal did not see fit to mention worries about the world-wide predatory marketing practices of a deceptively titled Standard Oil regime.
During the last 13 years, BP-America has merged with, or controls, all of the old Standard Oil "mini-companies" which existed before the original breakup by the U.S. government in 1911. The new Standard Oil regime is now known as BP-AMOCO, and few people in the world realize what has happened. It's now possible to understand why British Prime Minister Blair has become the spokesman for the new wars against terrorism (actually the war for Caspian Sea and Iraq oil).
At the end of WWII, General Douglas MacArthur became the military Governor of Japan. MacArthur's assistant was Laurence Rockefeller, one of John D. Rockefeller's four grandsons. As the second world war was drawing to a close, the U.S. was preparing for a massive invasion of the Japanese home islands.
The military had stockpiled vast supplies of weapons and munitions on the island of Okinawa. Some sources claim that with Vice-governor Laurence Rockefeller's assistance most of the armaments were sold to the leader of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, for something like one U.S. dollar and Ho’s "goodwill." One might wonder why these expensive and critical military supplies were "given" to the North Vietnamese.
To answer that question we have to go to an almost unknown study in the 1920's prepared by a man named Herbert Hoover, later to become President of the United States. The study showed that one of the world's largest oil fields ran along the coast of the South China Sea right off French Indo-China, now known as Vietnam. This was before offshore drilling had been invented and before a man named George Herbert Walker Bush was to become the CEO of a world-wide offshore drilling company.
In 1945, Vietnam was still a colony of the French. Laurence Rockefeller, it appears, had given the extensive store of weapons to Ho Chi Minh with the hope that Vietnam would drive out the French so that Standard Oil would be able to take over the as yet undeveloped offshore fields. In 1954, Vietnamese General Giap finally defeated and drove out the French at Dien Bien Phu with weaponry provided by the U.S. However, Ho Chi Minh reneged on the deal since he could read too, and he was well aware of the Hoover resource report and knew there was a vast supply of oil off the Vietnamese coast.
"In the 1950's a method of undersea oil exploration was perfected which used small explosions deep in the water and then recorded the sound echoes bouncing off the various layers of rock below. The surveyor could then determine the exact location of the arched salt domes which hold the accumulated oil beneath them. But if this method were used off the Vietnam coast on property Standard didn't own or have the rights to, the Vietnamese, the Chinese, the Japanese and probably even the French would quickly run to the United Nations and complain that America was stealing the oil, and that would shut down the operation.
"In 1964, after Vietnam was divided into North and South, and the contrived Gulf of Tonkin incident, several U.S. aircraft carriers were stationed offshore of Vietnam and the 'war' was started. Every day jet planes would take off from the carriers, bomb locations in North and South Vietnam, and then using normal military procedure when returning would dump their unsafe or unused bombs in the ocean before landing back on the carriers. Safe ordnance drop zones were designated for this purpose away from the carriers.
"Even close-up observers would only notice many small explosions occurring daily in the waters of the South China Sea and thought it was only part of the 'war.' The U.S. Navy carriers had begun Operation Linebacker One, and Standard Oil had begun its ten year oil survey of the seabed off of Vietnam. And the Vietnamese, Chinese and everybody else around, including the Americans, were none the wiser. The oil survey hardly cost Standard Oil a nickel, the U.S. taxpayers paid for it."
Marshall Douglas Smith. (2001). Black Gold Hot Gold, Ch. 3
So twenty years later and 57,000 Americans and half a million Vietnamese dead, Standard Oil had enough data and the war in Vietnam could end. Nelson Rockefeller's personal assistant, Henry Kissinger, represented the U.S. at the Vietnam/Paris Peace talks and won a Nobel Peace Prize in the bargain.
After the dust had settled from the war, Vietnam divided their offshore coastal area into numerous oil lots and allowed foreign companies to bid on the lots, with the proviso that Vietnam got a percentage of the action. Norway's Statoil, British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell, Russia, Germany and Australia all won bids and began drilling within their areas. Strange it was that none of them struck oil. However, the lots which Standard Oil bid for and won proved to have vast oil reserves. Their extensive undersea seismic research appears to have paid off.
Unfortunately, Big Oil's greed has not abated a whit.The American and British rulers have a new imperialistic strategy by which they hope to gain total control of the world's energy supplies and the strategic Eurasian land mass. First, they sell armaments to a regime (for example, Panama, Iraq, Yugoslavia/Kosovo, Afghan/Pakistan/Taliban Mujaheddin, Saudi Arabia). Then, they demonize the regime to which they sold the armaments and declare war on it (e.g. Panama Invasion, Gulf War, UN Kosovo war, Afghanistan war, Iraq War). After the war, they station permanent military bases in the country and use the military bases to control the energy resources in the surrounding countries. Current U.S. foreign policy is governed by the doctrine of "full-spectrum dominance": the U.S. must control military, economic and political developments everywhere.
"If you want to rule the world, you need to control oil. All the oil. Anywhere."
Monopoly, by Michel Collon
This new strategy began with the Panama invasion, next created the so-called Gulf War, continued with the UN-sanctioned war in the Balkans, and now expands with the new wars against terrorism (Afghanistan, the Philippines, Iraq, and beyond). On January 20, 2001, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that he was willing to deploy U.S. military forces in "another 15 countries" if that is what it takes to combat terrorism. The reason the so-called "war against terrorism" began in Afghanistan is because it is critical to the U.S.-British rulers' plans to control the Caspian Sea area oil and gas.
The UN-sanctioned war in the Balkans was all about oil and the pipeline easement for Caspian Sea oil to Western European markets through Kosovo to the Mediterranean Sea. When Yugoslavia refused to play ball with the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. and Germany began a systematic campaign of destabilization, even using some of the veterans of Afghanistan in that "war." Yugoslavia was broken up into compliant statelets, and the former Soviet Union was contained. The outcome: the de facto U.S. occupation of Kosovo--where America built its largest military base since the Vietnam War
The Caspian Sea area has proven oil reserves of fifteen to twenty-eight billion barrels plus estimated reserves of 40-178 billion, a total of 206 billion barrels--16 percent of the earth's potential oil reserves (compared to Saudi's 261 billion barrels of oil and America's own 22 billion barrels). Even at today's low prices, that could add up to $3 trillion in oil. With the Saudi regime tottering--an aging king about to die, widespread internal corruption creating calls for revolutionary overthrow--and a new source of oil and gas in the Caucasus, the Standard Oil suzerainty is looking to create a new regime in Saudi Arabia and develop a new center of operations in Southern Asia--think Iraq.
The huge oil and gas reserves in the Caspian Sea must either be moved west to European markets or south to Asian markets. The western route is to move oil from Chechnya, across the Black Sea and through the Bosporus to the Mediterranean, but the narrow Bosporus channel is already clogged with oil tankers from the Black Sea oil fields. An alternate route would be to move the tankers from the Black Sea, bypassing the Bosporus, up the Danube River and then through a very short pipeline across Kosovo to the Mediterranean at Tirana, Albania. However, that process was stopped by the Chinese who have supplied and armed the Albanians, as a client state, since 1949.
The other difficulty with the western route is that Western Europe is a tough market, characterized by high prices for oil products, an aging population, and increasing competition from natural gas. Furthermore, the region is fiercely competitive, now being serviced by oil from the Middle East, the North Sea, Scandinavia, and Russia. Western Europe is not a very attractive market, because substantial infrastructure would have to be developed to bring that oil from the Caspian to an already overly-competitive European market.
The only other ways to get Caspian Sea oil and gas to Asian markets is through China, which is too long a route, or through Iran, which is politically and economically inimical to U.S.-Standard Oil objectives.
As soon as the Soviets discovered the vast Caspian Sea oil fields in the late 1970's, they attempted to take control of Afghanistan to build a massive north-south pipeline system to allow the Soviets to send their oil directly through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean seaport. The result was the decades long Soviet-Afghan war. The Standard Oil-influenced U.S. government saw the danger of a Russian north-south pipeline and the CIA trained and funded armed terrorist groups, including Osama bin Laden, who defeated the Soviets in the late 1980's.
The Russians then tried to control the flow of oil and gas through its monopoly on pipelines. The Southern Asian Republics of the former Soviet Union--Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan--saw through this Russian monopolistic ploy and began to consult with Western companies.
The Standard Oil-influenced U.S. government now plans to thrust further along the 40th parallel from the Balkans through these Southern Asian Republics of the former Soviet Union. The U.S. military has already set up a permanent operations base in Uzbekistan. The so-called anti-terrorist strategy is clearly designed to simultaneously consolidate control over Middle Eastern and South Asian oil, and contain and neutralize the former Soviet Union. With that strategy, Afghanistan is exactly where they need to be.
Russia, realizing its weaker position vis-a-vis the United States, has been making noises as if it fully agreed with the U.S. incursions in Afghanistan. But Russia has joined the Shangahi Cooperation Organization (SCO) which includes China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Takijistan and Uzbekistan. China is using the SCO to try to align Russia economically and politically towards China and northeast Asia. Russia's membership in the SCO is an attempt to maintain its traditional hegemony in Central Asia. The underlying rationale of the SCO is the control of its members' enormous reserves of oil and gas.
Despite the misgivings of Russia, China, India, or any other nation, Afghanistan and Iraq will now become the base of operations in destabilizing, isolating, and establishing control over the South Asian regimes and the Middle-East. [Note that Iran stands between Iraq and Afghanistan and you can understand why bush included Iran in the "Axis of Evil."] After the conquest of this area is complete and the permanent military posts are set up, they will begin construction of a pipeline through Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan to deliver petroleum to the Asian market.
UNOCAL, the spearhead for Standard Oil interests, has been trying to build the north-south pipeline through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean for several decades. In 1998, the California-based UNOCAL, which held 46.5 percent stakes in Central Asia Gas (CentGas), a consortium that planned an ambitious gas pipeline across Afghanistan, withdrew in frustration after several fruitless years. The pipeline was to stretch 1,271 km from Turkmenistan's Dauletabad fields to Multan in Pakistan at an estimated cost of $1.9 billion. An additional $600 million would have brought the pipeline to energy-hungry India.
In the spring of 2001, Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney's company, signed a major contract with the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan to develop a 6000-square-meter marine base to support offshore oil construction in the Caspian Sea. The base will be used to assist Halliburton's catamaran crane vessel, the Qurban Abbasov, in upcoming offshore pipe-laying and subsea activities, according to a statement the company released May 15, 2001.
UNOCAL cut off its earlier agreement with the Taliban in 1998 when it became clear that the Taliban could not control all of Afghanistan and provide a stable political environment for a north-south pipeline construction project. It was likely at this juncture that a new "war against terrorism" ploy was conceived by the Standard Oil-influenced U.S. government. The "war against terrorism" in Afghanistan has come to a hiatus, with war-lords once again ruling the country, and the Bush administration has put their own man, Karzai, in power to control Afghanistan.
Karzai was a top adviser to UNOCAL during the negotiations with the Taliban to construct a Central Asia Gas (CentGas) pipeline from Turkmenistan through western Afghanistan to Pakistan. Karzai is the leader of the southern Afghan Pashtun Durrani tribe. A member of the mujaheddin that fought the Soviets during the 1980s, Karzai was a top contact for the CIA, maintaining close relations with CIA Director William Casey, Vice President George Bush, and their Pakistani Inter Service Intelligence (ISI) Service go-between. After the Soviet Union left Afghanistan, the CIA sponsored the relocation of Karzai and a number of his brothers to the U.S.
The real motives for the Bush administration's war in Afghanistan are clear for all to see. The U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan, Wendy Chamberlain, met with Pakistan's oil minister, Usman Aminuddin, in January, 2002 to continue plans for the north-south pipeline, encouraging the construction of Pakistan's Arabian Sea oil terminus for the pipeline.
President Bush says our military will continue its presence in Afghanistan, which means that while the U.N. forces serve as a paramilitary police force, U.S. soldiers will be guarding the construction of the north-south pipeline.
To assure that the pipeline project will proceed apace, the Afghani-American Zalmay Khalilzad, a previous member of the CentGas project, became President Bush's Special National Security Assistant. Khalilzad has recently been named presidential Special Envoy for Afghanistan. Khalilzad is a Pashtun and the son of a former government official under King Mohammed Zahir Shah. Along with being a consultant to the RAND Corporation, he was a special liaison between UNOCAL and the Taliban government. Khalilzad also worked on various risk analyses for the project under the direction of National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, a former member of the board of Chevron.
Now that the Afghanistan portion of the "war on terrorism" is concluded--with permanent U.S. military bases in Uzbekistan and Afghanistan in place--where next will the Standard Oil-influenced U.S. government look to gain further control over oil in the world? Coincidentally, most of those places are in countries which have been branded as harborers of terrorists: Iraq, Syria, Iran, and South America, among others.
Bush Sr.'s Gulf War in 1991 resulted in securing access to the huge Rumaila oil field of southern Iraq by expanding the boundaries of Kuwait after the war. This allows Kuwait, controlled by Standard Oil, to double its prewar oil output.
Iraq, which recently discovered an oil field in its western desert, is widely regarded as having more oil than Saudi Arabia once its deposits are developed. Prior to the 2003 U.S. preemptive invasion of Iraq, Iraq was producing 3 million barrels a day, funneling most of it to world markets through a United Nations-monitored program that directed the proceeds to food and medicine for the Iraqi people. Saddam Hussein was still exporting his oil to Syria, which was glad to resell Iraqi oil as if it were Syrian. The United States was one of Syria's biggest customers, because it liked the low sulfur content of Iraqi oil, according to Nimrod Raphaeli, publisher of the Middle East Economic News, a Washington-based newsletter. Iraq earned $1.5 billion a year from oil smuggling and oil sales outside UN controls, through Syria, Turkey, and Jordan, as well as by ship down the Gulf.
Beginning in September of 2001, the Bush regime threatened to include Iraq in its "war on terrorism." Any incursion into Iraq had to deal with the reality that American companies, such as Cheney's Halliburton and G.E. were making billions in Iraq by selling them goods and services. Also, the difficulty that the eradication of the Saddam Hussein regime would seriously compromise America's establishment of bases on the Arabian peninsula on the pretext of protecting poor Arab sheikhs against the Iraqi Evil Monster.
Prior to the 2003 Iraq war, Saddan was desperately trying to ingratiate himself with the Gulf Arab Cooperation Council (GCC) members: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to gain support for the lifting of the U.N. sanctions against it. Russia, Iraq's closest U.N. Security Council ally and a major beneficiary of contracts to purchase Iraqi oil and to sell Iraq humanitarian supplies, was demanding "a comprehensive settlement" of the sanctions issue, including steps leading to lifting the military embargo against Iraq. On January 24, 2002, Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov made a formal statement that Moscow was opposed to any U.S. military operation against Iraq.
Russia's Lukoil Oil Company and two Russian government agencies had a 23-year contract to develop Iraq's West Qurna oil field. By the terms of the contract, Lukoil was to get one half, Iraq one quarter, and the Russian government agencies were to get one quarter of the oil field's 667 million tons of crude, potentially a $20 billion deal. Iraq still owed Russia at least $8 billion from the old cold war days when Russia armed Iraq, considering it a client state. Is it any wonder that Russia opposed Bush's war on Iraq?
But because of United Nations sanctions on Iraq, Lukoil had not pumped a drop from West Qurna since it won drilling rights in 1997. In 2001, Saddam gave Russia $1.3 billion in oil contracts under the United Nations oil-for-food program that allowed Iraq to sell oil to buy supplies to help Iraqi civilians. In September, 2001, Saddam announced plans to award Russian companies another $40 billion in contracts as soon as United Nations sanctions were lifted.
In February, 2002, Russia's foreign minister, Igor S. Ivanov, said that Russia and Iraq saw eye to eye on questions of extremism and terrorism and that the American-backed sanctions against Iraq were counterproductive and should be lifted. He then emphasized that Russia solidly opposed "spreading or applying the international antiterror operation to any arbitrarily chosen state, including Iraq."
The 2003 Standard Oil-Bush junta war against Iraq ended all the prior Iraqi agreements with nations such as Russia, Germany, and France. The opposition by these Eurasian nations to Dubya's preemptive attack on Iraq was understandable--and Dubya's rush to war with Iraq now makes sense.
Also to be considered in any plans to extend the Standard Oil/Bush oil imperialism is China's growing interest in supporting Middle-East nations in their struggle against the U.S. During Jordanian King Abdallah II's January, 2002 visit to China, Chinese President Jiang Zemin said that China wanted stronger ties with Arab countries to help promote peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Yeah, sure, that's the reason China wants to put its foot into the Middle East, to promote peace. China has supplied military weaponry to Pakistan and may intervene if the Standard Oil/Bush imperialists continue to expand their empire in the Middle East.
'Civilization Begins at Home' NY World, Nov. 26, 1898 But the Standard Oil/Bush imperialists don't concern themselves with the threat of China in the Middle East. They've seized control of Iraq's oil and now have their eye on Syria's and Iran's oil as well. We're now in phase two of the war on terrorism: invading countries that Bush says harbor terrorists, with the real intent to seize those countries' energy sources. And since U.S.-British a.k.a. Standard Oil imperialism now--since 9/11--results in the killing of American civilians, we can say that the next phase of the war on terrorism will soon be at a theater near you.
U.S. soldiers are now guarding the north-south pipeline as it's built in Afghanistan. U.S. military weaponry to protect the Cano Limon pipelineIn the meantime, the hypocrisy of Bush's "war on terrorism" is apparent for all to see in Colombia where Bush proposes to spend $98 million to protect Occidental Petroleum's 480-mile-long pipeline which runs from Colombia's second-largest oil field to the Caribbean coast. The $98 million will follow the $1.3 billion the U.S. has already given to Colombia, ostensibly to fight the "drug terrorists." In 2001, the Cano Limon pipeline was closed for 266 days, due to holes blasted in it. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebels have blown holes in the pipeline for the past fifteen years, resulting in 2.5 million barrels of spilled oil oozing into Colombia's rivers and streams, about ten times the amount of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska.
If Bush enters this 38-year old conflict in Colombia which has resulted in 40,000 deaths in the past decade, he'll be involving the U.S. in a dead-end power struggle among FARC, the Cuban-inspired National Liberation Army (ELN), ultra-right paramilitary groups and the U.S.-supported fascist government. The excuse for spending U.S. taxpayers' money in Afghanistan was that Bin Laden was responsible for the September 11th attacks. Now the only pretext for spending taxpayers' money in Colombia is to combat the FARC and ELN "terrorists" who only threaten U.S. oil company resources, not American lives.
Invading Colombia follows the British-U.S. oil imperialism pattern: going where the oil is. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, Colombian oil production rose from only 100,000 barrels per day in the early 1980s to approximately 844,000 barrels in early 1999 -- an increase of nearly 750 percent. Colombian oil exports to the United States have also risen sharply, and today Colombia is this country's seventh largest supplier of petroleum. Colombia harbors large reserves of untapped oil and natural gas, possibly as much as 20 billion barrels (and Venezuela has 73 billion barrels in proven reserves); hence Colombia--and its oil-rich neighbor countries--become one of many new oil imperialism targets. The United States imports more oil from Colombia and its neighbors, Venezuela and Ecuador, than from all of the Persian Gulf.
A revealing feature of the South American "war on terrorism" is that, unlike the Taliban and al Qaeda, the Bush administration is not destroying the numerous South American drug terrorists. Why? Because the Bush administration and its plutocratic controllers are at the center of the $1.5 trillion per year in U.S. cash transactions that result from the international drug trade.
A drug terrorist, like a Carlos Lehder, a Pablo Escobar, an Amado Fuentes, a Matta Ballesteros or a Hank Rohn, constantly has something like ten billion dollars of useless illegal money that he has to put in a cooperative bank or business venture that will launder it for him. The drug lord is then more than happy to loan the laundered money at five percent interest to underwrite the large corporations and crooked politicians throughout the world.
Wall Street and the Bush administration depend on the South American drug barons for hundreds of millions of dollars for corporate income and election campaign finances. For every million dollars of increased sales or increased revenues that a company like Enron realized from a buyout, the stock equity of the one per cent who control Wall Street increases twenty to thirty times.
Wall Street embracing drug terrorism In June, 1999, Colombia's president Andres Pastrana arranged for Richard Grasso, head of the New York Stock Exchange, to meet with Raúl Reyes, the head of FARC finances, in the cocaine-producing DMZ of Colombia. The two were caught in an infamous embrace that saw very little exposure in the media.
Grasso, however, wasn't the only American big-money representative to cozy up to Colombian drug terrorists. Several months after Grasso's visit, two wealthy members of the American Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) captured world headlines by flying to a FARC redoubt in the Colombian jungles to palaver with the terrorists' founder, U.S. corporations embracing drug terrorism70-year-old Manuel Marulanda. After meeting with the communist drug terrorist, James Kimsey, co-founder and chairman emeritus of America Online Inc., and Joseph Robert, head of J.E. Robert Company, a global real estate empire, flew to Bogota to consult with Colombian president Pastrana. On returning to Washington, the CFR representatives said they were convinced that Marulanda and FARC are sincere in their claims of wanting peace and economic reform.
It may seem hard to believe that U.S. banks and corporations would be involved in laundering drug money from South American terrorists. Even the supine media have had to report some of this criminal behavior. A 1983 ABC News "Close up" on drugs and money laundering fingered Citibank, Marine Midland, Chase Manhattan, and most of the 250 banks and branches in Miami. When Ramon Milian Rodriguez, a top accountant and money launderer for the Medellin Cartel, testified before a Senate subcommittee in 1988, he implicated a veritable "Who's Who" in U.S. finance:
* Citibank
* Citicorp
* Bank of America
* First National Bank of Boston
Citibank "In every instance," said Rodriguez, "the banks knew who they were dealing with...." The evidence indicates that Rodriguez is right; the banks often play dumb, but they know what they're doing.
A 1998 investigation of Citibank by the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) revealed that Citibank had secretly transferred between $90 million and $100 million of alleged drug money for a Mexican client, using many creative methods to camouflage the movement of the assets.
Oil imperialism rests on our continued dependence on oil, which not only threatens the future of humanity through prolonged and bloody conflict, but through another even more insidious threat--climate change and ecological collapse.
"The oil industry has destroyed Colombia's forests, as well as the culture and subsistence of its Indigenous Peoples. A major part of the country's territory has been affected by oil-related activities, including colonization. Some Indigenous Peoples, such as the Yariguies, have been exterminated. Others, like the Motilones, the Cofanes and the Guahibos, have been decimated. Nowadays, the U'wa people find their ancestral lands threatened by oil exploitation that could destroy their forests, their lives and their culture.
"The process of territorial occupation by oil companies has been stimulated by Colombian legislation, which has provided large incentives for oil projects. Oil companies are allowed to occupy the five-kilometer area surrounding an oil well, thus displacing Indigenous and farmers' communities and destroying biodiversity-rich forest zones.
"Currently, seven million hectares of Colombian land are occupied by oil operations, and ten million more have been awarded to oil companies over recent years. Thus, 17 million hectares of forested land is currently at the disposition of transnational oil companies."
'Dogwood' by Bierstadt
Oil imperialism flourishes when a supine press cheers and a groveling congress grants unconstitutional authority to the oil-saturated Demonic Cabal. Despite our grief and rage over terrorist atrocities, a "war on terrorism" cannot be fought with bombs and missiles alone. Citizens throughout the world must awaken to this new U.S.-British imperialism and reclaim their governments. Once democracy is re-established, we can start a war on homelessness, poverty, and economic and political inequalities, and begin work to achieve ecological sustainability for our planet.
Updated: 3/19/07 -- original article: 10/29/01
Relevant Links and Updates
* 3/19/07: Iraq War: Raising Oil Prices
* 3/19/07: Power shifts in global oil business
* 10/18/06: Petro-Cartel Almost Has Iraq's Oil
* 5/23/06: The Great Iraq Oil Grab
* 3/21/06: The Bush Junta Accomplished Its Mission in Iraq
* 12/18/05: The Rip-off of Iraq's Oil Wealth
* 10/30/05: Two new movies about contemporary oil imperialism and its political implications
* 9/1/05: Oil Companies Intentionally Limited Refining Capacity to Drive Up Gasoline Prices
* 9/1/05: Big Oil's Big-time Looting
* 6/1/05: Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline: a sign of rising great power rivalry in Central Asia
* 5/3/05: Oil, Geopolitics, and the Coming War with Iran
* 4/5/05: Another Big Oil Mega-monopoly Merger
* Bush Junta attacks new Russia-China-India-Brazil-Venezuela coalition "Axis of Evil"
o Rumsfeld escalates threats against Venezuela
o Washington Focuses on Southern "Axis of Evil"
o The Background of the new "Axis of Evil"
* 3/17/05: Secret U.S. Plans for Iraq's Oil
* 2/2/04: Why Cheney and the Bush Junta Don't Want the Energy Task Force Records Made Public
* 2/2/04: Maps and Charts of the Oil Corridor
* 12/5/03: Bush Junta Takes Over Georgia to Oppose Russia: Baku to Ceyhan pipeline slated to open in 2005
* 11/11/03: Israel's Blitzkrieg on Middle East Oil
* 10/14/03: Bush's Lies About the Iraq Oil
* 9/15/03: Bush I in Russia to Secure Oil for ChevronTexaco and Carlyle Group
* 8/26/03: Washington Signals Escalation of US Intervention in Colombia
* 8/11/03: The Spoils of the Iraq War
* 8/8/03: Bush Executive Order Exempts US Oil Companies from Liability in Iraq and US
* 8/8/03: Bush's oil move backfires
* 5/25/03: Iraq's New U.S.-Appointed Oil "Minister" Cancels Former Contracts with Russia and China
* 1/9/03: When ExxonMobil and BP need millions to pay for their oil projects, who do they turn to? The U.S. government.
* 12/21/02: US Bases in Afghanistan to Protect Oil Pipelines
* 11/3/02: Carve-up of oil riches begins
* 8/30/02: U.S.-British Pipeline Company formed to pump Caspian sea oil to the West
* 5/30/02: After waiting until they thought the American public wouldn't notice, the Bush administration went ahead on May 30, 2002 with the oil pipeline deal that was the underlying reason for the Afghanistan war.
* 5/26/02: Ashcroft and Cheney tied to Big Oil campaign contributions and bribes
* 5/17/02: Report Alleges US Role in Angola Arms-for-Oil Scandal
* 05/16/02: The emerging connection between oil plans and the 9-11 attacks
* 5/15/02: World Bank chief in talks over massive central Asian pipeline
* 05/15/02:Afghanistan plans gas pipeline
* 05/14/02: Oil fuels US army role in Georgia
* 1/15/02: America Goes Into the Energy Business With the Former Evil Empire [Russia]
* 1/11/02: U.S. bases pave the way for long-term intervention in Central Asia
* 1/9/02: The Pipeline Plots
* 1/3/02: Oil Company Adviser Named U.S. Representative to Afghanistan
* 12/23/01: Russia Wins the Afghanistan Oil War
* 12, 2001The Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC)
Ownership structure of CPC
* 12/15/01: As the War Shifts Alliances, Oil Deals FollowNew York Times
* 12/3/01: U.S. Oil War Caspian Pipeline Opens Washington Times
* 11/19/01: "U.S. efforts to make peace summed up by 'oil' Irish Times
* 11/19/01: "The United States of Oil" By Damien Cave, Salon
* 11/15/01: U.S. Policy Towards Taliban Influenced by Oil
* 10/30/01: "You've Got to Go Where the Oil Is" Special to The Dubya Report
* Another point of view?
Bibliography
* Brisard, J, and Dasquie, G. Forbidden Truth, 2002
* Rashid, Ahmed, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, 2000
* Pilger, John, Hidden Agenda
* Klare, Michael, Resource Wars
* Yergin, Daniel, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power, (1991)
* Pepe Escobar, The war for Pipelineistan, Asian Times (1/26/02)
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