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 thepetrochemical 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 combustionengine and the transformation of global transport; the House of Saud and the oil wars in theMiddle East. Other parts are more obscure: the quest for oil and the outbreak of World War I; the petrochemicalinterests behind modern medicine; the Big Oil money behind the “Green Revolution”and the “Gene Revolution. ”But that story, properly told, begins somewhere unexpected. Not in Pennsylvania with the firstcommercial drilling operation and the first oil boom, but in the rural backwoods of early19th century New York state. And it doesn’t start with crude oil or its derivatives, buta different product altogether: snake oil. “Dr. Bill Livingston, Celebrated Cancer Specialist” was the very image of the travelingsnake oil salesman. He was neither a doctor, nor a cancer specialist; his real name wasnot even Livingston. More to the point, the “Rock Oil” tonic he pawned was a uselessmixture of laxative and petroleum and had no effect whatsoever on the cancer of thepoor townsfolk he conned into buying it. He lived the life of a vagabond, always on the run from the last group of people he hadfooled, engaged in ever more outrageous deceptions to make sure that the past wouldn’t catchup with him. He abandoned his first wife and their six children to start a bigamous marriagein Canada at the same time as he fathered two more children by a third woman. He adoptedthe 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 wouldteach 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 realname was William Avery Rockefeller, and it was his son, John D. Rockefeller, who wouldgo 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 worldfounded on treachery, deceit, and the naivety of a public that has never wised up to theparlor tricks that the Rockefellers and their ilk have been using to shape the world forthe past century and a half. This is the story of the oiligarchy. PART ONE: BIRTH OF THE OIL-IGARCHYTitusville, 1857. A most unlikely man alights from a railway car into the midst of thissleepy Western Pennsylvania town on the shores of Oil Creek: “Colonel” Edwin Drake. He’sfrom 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 byGeorge Bissell and James Townsend, a lawyer and a banker who started the PennsylvaniaRock Oil Company after they discovered they could distill the region’s naturally occurringSeneca oil into lamp oil, or kerosene. Drake is actually an unemployed railroad conductorwho 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 seepsand collecting in the creek, but other than as a cure-all medicine or grease for the localsawmill’s machinery, it’s hardly seen as something valuable. In fact, it can bea downright nuisance, contaminating brine wells that supply Pittsburgh’s booming saltindustry. Still, Drake has a task to complete: finding a way to collect enough oil to make the distillationof Seneca oil into lamp oil profitable. He tries everything he can think of. The NativeAmericans had historically collected the oil by damming the creek near a seep and skimmingthe 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 floodsin too quickly. By the summer of 1859 he’s desperate. Drake’s running out of ideas, Bissell and Townsendare running out of patience and, most importantly, the company is running out of funds. He turnsto “Uncle” Billy Smith, a Pittsburgh blacksmith who had experience drilling brine wells withsteam-powered equipment. They get to work drilling down through the shale bedrock toreach the oil. It’s maddeningly slow work, with the crude equipment struggling to getthrough three feet of bedrock a day. By August 27th they’ve drilled down 69 and a halffeet, Drake has used the last of his funds, and Bissell and his partners have decidedto close up the operation. On August 28th, they strike oil. Narrator: Then on Sunday, August 28th, 1859, oil bubbled up the drive pipe. Uncle Billyand his son Sam bailed out several buckets of oil. On Monday, the very day that ColonelDrake received his final payment and an order to close down the operation, they hitchedthe 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 theystruck 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?’ AndI said, ‘That is your fortune!'”Drake’s well proved that by drilling for it, oil could be found in abundance and producedcheaply. Overnight a whole new industry was born. Before long in millions of homes, farmsand factories around the world, lamps would be lit with kerosene refined from West Pennsylvaniacrude. Daniel Yergin: When the word came out that Drake had struck oil, the cry went up throughoutthe narrow valleys of Western Pennsylvania: ‘The crazy Yankee has struck oil! The crazyYankee 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 bustlingoil region, with prospectors leasing up flats, towns springing up from nowhere, and a forestof 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 Clevelandwith a head for numbers: John Davison Rockefeller. He had two ambitions in life: to make $100,000and 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. Andhe read about the oil business just beginning and got interested, and came to realize itwas a very volatile business at the time. SOURCE: The Prize Part 1In 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 gettinghis product to market. In 1865 the shrewd John D. bought out his partners for $72,500and, with Andrews as partner, launched Rockefeller & Andrews. By 1870, after five years of strategicpartnerships 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 replacea world of independent oilmen with a giant company controlled by him. In 1870, beggingbankers for more loans, he formed Standard Oil of Ohio. The next year, he quietly putwhat he called “our plan” — his campaign to dominate the volatile oil industry — intodevastating effect. Rockefeller knew that the refiner with the lowest transportationcost could bring rivals to their knees. He entered into a secret alliance with the railroadscalled the South Improvement Company. In exchange for large, regular shipments, Rockefellerand 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 struggledto 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 SouthImprovement Company — a company unheard of until now — were exempt. … Nobody waitedto 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 refiningin the world. Within a few years, he will control 90 percent of the marketing of oiland a third of all of the oil wells. So this very young man controls what is not only anational but an international monopoly in a commodity that is about to become the mostimportant strategic commodity in the world economy. SOURCE: The RockefellersBy the 1880s, the American oil industry was the Standard Oil Company. And Standard Oilwas John D. Rockefeller. But it wasn’t long until a handful of similarly ambitious (and well-connected) families beganto 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 openedup the vast Caspian Sea oil deposits to private development. Two families quickly combinedforces to take advantage of the opportunity: the Nobels, led by Ludwig Nobel and includinghis dynamite-inventing prize-creating brother Alfred, and the French branch of the infamousRothschild banking dynasty, led by Alphonse Rothschild. In 1891, the Rothschilds contracted with M. Samuel & Co. , a Far East shipping companyheadquartered 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. Theproject was immense; it involved not only sophisticated engineering to construct thefirst oil tankers to be approved by the Suez Canal Company, but the strictest secrecy. If word of the endeavour was to get back to Rockefeller through his international intelligencenetwork it would risk bringing the wrath of Standard Oil, which could afford to cut ratesand 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 thatreliance 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 againstRoyal Dutch Petroleum, established in The Hague in 1890 with the support of King WilliamIII 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 ofthe 20th century. In 1901 millionaire socialite William Knox D’arcy negotiated an incredibleconcession with the king of Persia: exclusive rights to prospect for oil throughout mostof the country for 60 years. After 7 years of fruitless search, D’Arcy and his Glasgowbased partner, Burmah Oil, were ready to abandon the country altogether. In early May of 1908they sent a telegram to their geologist telling him to dismiss his staff, dismantle his equipmentand 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 Persianoil. The British government took 51% majority control of the company’s shares in 1914at the behest of Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, and survives todayas BP. The Rothschilds and Nobels. The Dutch royal family. The Rockefellers. These early titansof the oil industry and their corporate shells pioneered a new model for amassing and expandingfortunes hitherto unheard of. They were the scions of a new oligarchy, one built aroundoil and its control, from wellhead to pump. But it was not just about money. The monopolization of this, the key energy resource of the 20thcentury, 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 aspectof their daily lives. In the late 19th century, however, it was by no means certain that oil would becomethe key resource of the 20th century. As cheap illumination from the newly-commercializedlight bulb began to destroy the market for lamp oil, the oiligarchs were on the vergeof losing the value from their monopoly. But a series of “lucky strikes” was aboutto catapult their fortunes even further. The very next year after the commercial introduction of the light bulb, another invention camealong to save the oil industry: German engineer Karl Benz patented a reliable, two-strokeinternal combustion engine. The engine ran on gasoline, another petroleum byproduct,and became the basis for the Benz Motorwagen that, in 1888, became the first commerciallyavailable automobile in history. And with that stroke of luck, the business that Rockefellerand 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 ofthe automobile era it was by no means certain that gas-powered cars would come to dominatethe market. Working models of electric vehicles had been around since the 1830s, and the firstelectric car was built in 1884. By 1897 there was a fleet of all-electric taxis shuttlingpassengers 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 theUnited States. The electrics had advantages over the internal combustion engine: theyrequired no gear shifting or hand cranking, and had none of the vibration, smell, or noiseassociated with gasoline-powered cars. Lady Luck intervened again on January 10, 1901, when prospectors struck oil at Spindletopin 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’tlong 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 thatStandard Oil, Shell, Gulf, Texaco, Anglo-Persian and the other oil majors of the time weredrilling, 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 unprecedentedwealth he had amassed through Standard Oil. Muckraking reporters like Ida Tarbell begandigging up the dirt on his rise to power through railroad conspiracies, secret deals with competitorsand other shady practices. The press pictured him as a colossus with bribed politiciansliterally in the palm of his hand; Standard Oil was a menacing octopus with its tentaclesstrangling the lifeblood of the nation. Hearings began, investigations were launched, lawsuitswere brought against him. And then, finally, in 1911 the Supreme Court made a monumentaldecision. Narrator: On May 15th, 1911, the Supreme Court of the United States declared that StandardOil was a monopoly in restraint of trade and should be dissolved. Rockefeller heard ofthe decision while golfing at Kykuit with a priest from the local Catholic church, FatherJ. P. Lennon. Ron Chernow, Biographer: And Rockefeller reacted with amazing aplomb. He turned to the Catholicpriest and said, “Father Lennon, have you some money?” And the priest was very startledby 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 thanthe 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 JohnD. Rockefeller into history’s first billionaire. So that Standard Oil was punished in the federalantitrust case, but John D. Rockefeller, Sr. most assuredly was not. SOURCE: The RockefellersTo the amazement of the world, Rockefeller’s punishment had in fact been his reward. Ratherthan being taken down a peg, the splitting up of the Standard Oil monopoly had launchedhim as the world’s only acknowledged billionaire at a time when the average annual income inAmerica was $520. Rockefeller’s story was perfectly mirrored by the story of Colonel Edwin Drake. Havingstruck oil in Titusville and given rise to a billion dollar global industry, Drake hadnot had the foresight to patent his drilling technique or even to buy up the land aroundhis own well. He ended up in poverty, relying on an annuity from the state of Pennsylvaniato scrape together a living and dying in 1880. For the oiligarchy, the lesson of the rise and rise of Rockefeller was obvious: the moreruthlessly that monopoly was pursued, the tighter that control was grasped, the greaterthe 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 SINWhen asked how he could justify the treachery and deceit with which he pursued the creationof the Standard Oil monopoly, John D. Rockefeller is reputed to have said: “Competition isa sin. ” This is the mentality of the monopolist, and it is this justification, framed as religiousconviction, that drove the oiligarchs to so ruthlessly eliminate anyone who would darerise up as a pretender to their throne. Ironically, it was the competition between the oiligarchs in the early 20th century thathelped 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, andengines often had to be adaptable to the fuel that was available. ”In many areas where oil wasn’t available, the alternative was alcohol. Ethyl alcoholhad been used as a fuel for lamps and engines since the early 19th century. Although itwas 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 USGeological Survey and the US Navy in 1907 and 1908 proved that the higher compressionratio of alcohol engines could perfectly offset the lower heat value, thus making alcoholand gasoline engines fuel economy equivalent. One early supporter of alcohol fuel was Henry Ford, who designed his Model T to run on eitheralcohol or gasoline. Sensing an opportunity for new markets to boost the independent Americanfarms 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 vegetablematter that can be fermented. ”Farmers, looking to capitalize on this, lobbied for the repeal of a $2. 08 per gallon alcoholtax that had been imposed to help pay for the Civil War. They were aided by those whosaw fuel alcohol as a way to break the oiligarchs’ monopoly. In support of a bill to repeal thealcohol tax, President Teddy Roosevelt told the US Congress in 1906:“The Standard Oil Company has, largely by unfair or unlawful methods, crushed out homecompetition. It is highly desirable that an element of competition should be introducedby the passage of some such law as that which has already passed the House, putting alcoholused 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 wascheaper than gasoline at 22 cents a gallon. The promise of cheap, unpatentable, unmonopolizablefuel production, production open to anyone with raw vegetable matter and a still, sweptthe nation. But cheap, plentiful fuel that can be grown and produced locally and independently isnot what the oiligarchs had in mind. A 1909 USGS report comparing gas and alcohol engines had noted that a significant pointin alcohol fuel’s favour was that there were fewer restrictions on alcohol engines. For the oiligarchs, the answer was simple: find a way to place greater restrictions onalcohol engines. Thankfully for them, the answer to their problem was already gainingpopular support. In the 19th century, America had a drinking problem. By 1830, the average American over15 years old drank seven gallons of pure alcohol per year, three times higher than today’saverage. This led to the first anti-alcohol movements in the 1830s and 1840s, and theformation of the Prohibition Party in 1869 and the Women’s Christian Temperance Unionin the 1870s. The movement enjoyed widespread and growing support but had few politicalsuccesses; Maine flirted with prohibition by outlawing the sale and manufacture of liquorin 1851, but the ban only lasted five years. This changed with the formation of the Anti-Saloon League in Standard Oil’s birth state ofOhio in 1893. The ASL was started by John D. Rockefeller’s long-time personal friendHoward Hyde Russell and was bankrolled in part by generous annual donations from Rockefellerhimself. The ASL, with Rockefeller’s backing, quickly became the driving force behind anational movement to outlaw the production and sale of alcohol. Rockefeller was a teetotaler himself, not from moral concern but because he was afraidthat “good cheer among friends” would lead to his downfall in business. StephenHarkness, one of the silent partner investors in Standard Oil and a director in the companyuntil his death, had caught Rockefeller’s eye when he made a fortune buying up whiskeyin advance of a new excise tax that he had been tipped about and selling it at a hugeprofit after the tax kicked in. No, Rockefeller and Standard Oil were not concerned about the moral state of the nation…exceptas far as it impacted their bottom line. But when prohibition did come in 1920, it hadan 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 productsto their ethanol to make it poisonous before it could be sold. Alcohol fuel, now completelyunable 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 aneven 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 10Americans owned a car. Rail was still the transportation of choice for the vast majorityof the public, and city-dwellers in most major cities relied on electric trolley networksto transport them around town. In 1936, General Motors formed a front company, “NationalCity Lines,” along with Firestone Tire and Standard Oil of California, to implement aprocess of “bustitution”: scrapping streetcars and tearing up railways to replace them withGM’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 electrictransit systems in 45 cities and put gas-burning GM buses on the streets in their place. By1955 almost 90% of the electric streetcar lines in the United States had been rippedout or otherwise eliminated. ”The cartel had been careful to hide their involvement in National City Lines, but itwas revealed to the public in 1946 by an enterprising retired naval lieutenant commander, EdwinJ. Quinby. He wrote a manifesto exposing what he called “a careful, deliberately plannedcampaign to swindle you out of your most important and valuable public utilities–your ElectricRailway System. ” He uncovered the oiligarchs’ stock ownership of National City Lines andits subsidiaries and detailed how they had step by step bought up and destroyed the publictransportation 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 CityLines was indicted for conspiring to form a transportation monopoly and conspiring tomonopolize sales of buses and supplies. In 1949, GM, Firestone, Standard Oil of Californiaand 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 itoversaw 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 1953President Eisenhower appointed Charles Wilson, then the President of General Motors, as Secretaryof Defense. Wilson, with Francis DuPont of the Rockefeller-connected DuPont family asChief Administrator of Federal Highways, oversaw one of the largest public works projects inAmerican history: the creation of the interstate highway system. With a war-era excise taxon train tickets still in place and federally funded highways and airports providing cheaperalternatives, rail travel declined a startling 84% between 1945 and 1964. This social engineering paid off well for Standard Oil and its growing list of petrochemicalassociates. In the two and a half decades after the outbreak of World War II, vehicleproduction in Detroit almost tripled, from 4. 5 million cars a year in 1940 to over 11million 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 investmentsfrom upstart competitors. In 1889, a consortium of German investors led by Siemens’ Deutsche Bank obtained aconcession from the Turkish government for extension of a railway line connecting Berlinto 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 mineralrights for twenty kilometers on either side of the line…an especially lucrative dealsince the rail cut right through the heart of the still untapped Mesopotamian oil regionssouth 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 forits exports — its industrial exports — as the German economy was growing like China’shas grown in the last 30 years. And they decided that Turkey would be an ideal strategic tradepartner for Germany. And Georg von Siemens, one of the directors of Deutsche Bank, cameup with a strategy to extend a railway from Berlin all the way down to Baghdad — whichwas then part of the Ottoman Empire, Baghdad and Iraq today, near the Persian Gulf. Germanmilitary began training the Turkish military. German industry began investing in Turkey. They saw a huge potential market to begin bringing Turkey into the 20th century economically. Deutsche Bank also negotiated mineral rights — I think it was 20 kilometres either sideof the railway — and it was already known in 1914 that Mosul and these other areas containedhuge petroleum deposits. Well, why is that significant? At the end of the 19th century, Jack Fisher–the headof the Admiralty and the head of the Royal Navy–advocated the conversion of the BritishNavy from coal-fired to oil-fired. That it would have a qualitative strategic improvementin every aspect of warship design. And since Britain didn’t know that they had any oilback then they went to Persia and swindled the Shah out of oil rights in Persia. Theywent 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 donewithout approval of the British Governor. And Kuwait was known to have oil lying righton the Persian Gulf. The British looked at this railway plan of the Germans going right down to Baghdad andsaid ‘My God! You can put soldiers on rail cars and bring them down and threaten theoil lifeline of the British Navy. ’ This is a strategic move by the Germans. It alsowould make Germany independent of the British control of the seas. They would have a landlinemuch like the Chinese “One Belt, One Road” infrastructure for high speed rails goingthroughout Eurasia into Russia, on into Belarus and Western Europe that removes the UnitedStates’ 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 inAnglo-Persian Oil and the Rothschild’s merchant Marcus Samuel at Royal Dutch Shell, soughtto counter this German threat to their commercial and strategic interests. They used Armenian-bornnaturalized British citizen Calouste Gulbenkian–the architect of the Royal Dutch / Shell merger–inorder, 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 theBarings banking family, Cassel himself, and Gulbenkian, the Bank set up the Turkish PetroleumCompany in 1912. Formed explicitly to exploit the petroleum-rich oil fields of Iraq, thenpart of the Ottoman Empire, Gulbenkian brokered a deal that forced Deutsche Bank, with its40 kilometre concessions along the oil-rich Baghdad railway line, into a junior partnershipin the company. The stock was split so the British government’s Anglo-Persian Oil Companyowned 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 inan amazing irony, it didn’t even matter. Gulbenkian finished negotiations for the Iraqioil 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 inwar. By the end of World War I, the British and their allies had taken over Iraq and itsoil 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 familiesthat had dominated it since its inception. Oil deposits were located around the globeand the resources of entire nation states were marshaled to control them. Now, threatsto the oiligarchs and their interests required multi-lateral, multi-national responses andthe 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 booksis 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 countriesin the Middle East and South America formed OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum ExportingCountries. In 1973 OPEC placed an oil embargo on the US and other nations that had supportedIsrael against the Arab states in the Yom Kippur war. The American economy went intoa tailspin as gas shortages gripped the nation. SOURCE: History of OilFew, however, know that the crisis and its ensuing response was in fact prepared monthsahead of time at a secret meeting in Sweden in 1973. The meeting was the annual gatheringof the Bilderberg Group, a secretive cabal formed by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlandsin 1954. The Dutch royal family not only gave its royal imprint to Royal Dutch Petroleum, they arestill rumoured to be, along with the Rothschilds, one of the largest shareholders in Royal DutchShell, from the days when Queen Wilhelmina’s Anglo-Dutch Petroleum holdings and other investmentsmade her the world’s first female billionaire right through to today. Bernhard’s guestlist at the Bilderberg Group reflected his position in the oiligarchy; alongside himat the Swedish conference were David Rockefeller of the Standard Oil dynasty and his protegeHenry Kissinger, Baron Edmond de Rothschild, E. G. Collado, the Vice President of Exxon,Sir Denis Greenhill, director of British Petroleum, and Gerrit A. Wagner, president of Bernhard’sown Royal Dutch Shell. At the meeting in Sweden, held five months before the oil crisis began, the oil-igarchsand their political and business allies were planning their response to a monetary crisisthat 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 ofthe world monetary system, convertible to gold at $35 per ounce with all other currenciespegged 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 tideof demand, Nixon abandoned Bretton Woods in August 1971, threatening the dollar’s positionas the world reserve currency. Richard Nixon: Accordingly, I have directed the Secretary of the Treasury to take theaction necessary to defend the dollar against the speculators. I have directed SecretaryConnally to suspend temporarily the convertability of the dollar into gold or other reserve assetsexcept in amounts and conditions determined to be in the interest of monetary stabilityand in the best interest of the United States. SOURCE: Nixon Ends Bretton WoodsAs leaked documents from the 1973 Bilderberg meeting show, the oiligarchs decided to usetheir control over the flow of oil to save the American hegemon. Acknowleding that OPEC“could completely disorganize and undermine the world monetary system,” the Bilderbergattendees 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 fromthe current price of $3. 01 per barrel. Five months later, Bilderberg attendee and Rockefeller protege Henry Kissinger, actingas 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 demandedand 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 priceincrease, he replied: “Tell your King, if he wants the answer to this question, he shouldgo 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 oilsales in dollars and recycle those dollars through treasury purchases via Wall Streetbanks. The deal was a bonanza for the oiligarchs; not only did they get to pass the price increaseson 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’sown 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 reachedunprecedented levels of control over the economy. Not only that, they had backed the world monetarysystem with their commodity, oil, and brought potential competition from upstart producernations under their control all in one step. But for the insatiable appetites of these monopolist titans, mere control over the world’smonetary system was not enough…PART THREE: THE WORLD IN THEIR IMAGEIn the nineteenth century, railroad conspiracies and predatory pricing had been enough to assurethe 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 FarEast to oil exploration in the early twentieth century, the goal was no longer to maximizeprofits 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 RockefellerPlaza or Rockefeller University than Standard Oil, it is difficult to understand just howhated John D. was in his own day. He was the head of the Standard Oil Hydra, an octopusstrangling the world in his tentacles, a cutthroat gardener pruning the competitors from theflower of his oil monopoly. As one of the richest men the world had ever known, he wasan easy target for the average working man’s frustrations and a magnet for the poor seekinghelp. Judith Sealander, Historian: He received on average 50 to 60,000 letters a month, askingfor help. Dozens of people followed him in the street. Literally, crowds stood aroundthe 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 RockefellersBesieged by the downtrodden, despised by the working man, hounded by Ida Tarbell and themuckraking press, John D. had the mother of all PR problems. The answer was simple: inventthe PR industry. He hired Ivy Ledbetter Lee, a journalist-turned-communications expertwho 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 JohnD. handing out dimes in public. Narrator: An early master of public relations, Lee used the media which the muckrakers hadused to disgrace Rockefeller to turn him into a sympathetic figure. Ivy Lee recognized earlythe power of the new moving picture and used newsreels to show a remarkably benevolentRockefeller. John D. Rockefeller: I am very grateful to you and to a host of people who are so kindand 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 Frankensteinon the loose walking around New York City or something like that, with a cane and along hat. Narrator: Although this plane never takes off, this photo opportunity was presentedas Senior’s first flight. Perhaps Ivy Lee’s most brilliant public relations move was thecasting 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 OilThese PR stunts seem obvious and ham-handed by today’s standards, but they were effectiveenough: to this day people leave dimes on the stone marker at the base of the 70 footEgyptian obelisk that towers over John D. ’s final resting place in Cleveland’s LakeView Cemetery. But it was not stage-managed photo opportunities like these that transformedRockefeller into a public hero. In order to win the public over, he was going to have to give them what they wanted. Andwhat 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 endof 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 transformedfrom the ground up. Americans in the 19th century still prized education and intellectualpursuits, with the 1840 census finding unsurprisingly that the United States–a nation that hadbeen mobilized by tracts like Thomas Paine’s remarkably popular Common Sense–was a nationof readers, with a remarkable 93% to 100% literacy rate. Before the first compulsoryschooling laws in Massachusetts in 1852, education was private and decentralized, and as a resultclassical education, including study of Greek and Latin and a solid grounding in historyand 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 intellectwas developed just enough to prepare them for lives of drudgery in a factory. Into themidst stepped John D. Rockefeller with his first great act of public charity: the establishmentof the University of Chicago. He was aided in this task by Frederick Taylor Gates, a Baptist minister that Rockefellerbefriended in 1889 and who would go on to be John D. ’s most trusted philanthropicadviser. 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 perfectdocility 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 responsivefolk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophersor 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 havebeen. In 1902 he established the General Education Board to help implement Gates’ vision forthe country school of tomorrow with a staggering $180 million endowment. The Rockefeller influence on education was felt almost immediately, and it was amplifiedby help from fellow monopolists of the era who were approaching the topic of philanthropyfrom the same angle. Although best known as a steel magnate, Andrew Carnegie’s fortune started on the railroadstransporting Rockefeller’s Standard Oil around the country, and was greatly magnifiedby a lucrative investment in property near Oil Creek that provided steady, profitableoil 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 developmentof the education system in the the United States, and, eventually, worldwide. In 1910,Rockefeller followed suit by establishing the Rockefeller Foundation, which became thetax-free umbrella organization for his philanthropic ambitions. As the Reece Committee–a Congressional investigation into the activities of these tax-free foundationsin the 1950s–discovered, it wasn’t long before Carnegie’s Endowment approached Rockefeller’sFoundation with a proposal: to cooperate on their shared desire to transform the Americaneducation system in their own image. Norman Dodd, the director of research for the Congressionalcommittee who was granted access to the Carnegie Endowment’s board minutes, explains:So they approach the Rockefeller Foundation with a suggestion: that portion of educationwhich 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 alterationof the teaching of American History. So, they approach four of the then most prominent teachersof American History in the country — people like Charles and Mary Byrd. Their suggestionto 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. “buildour own stable of historians. ” Then, they approach the Guggenheim Foundation, whichspecializes in fellowships, and say” “When we find young men in the process of studyingfor 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 thesetwenty potential teachers of American History to London. There, they are briefed in whatis expected of them — when, as, and if they secure appointments in keeping with the doctoratesthey will have earned. That group of twenty historians ultimately becomes the nucleus of the American HistoricalAssociation. And then, toward the end of the 1920’s, the Endowment grants to the AmericanHistorical Association four hundred thousand dollars ($400,000) for a study of our historyin 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: thefuture of this country belongs to collectivism, administered with characteristic Americanefficiency. SOURCE: Norman Dodd interviewWith this base for transformation firmly established, the Rockefeller Foundation and like-mindedorganization 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 Rockefellerhad 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 premisesas “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 thanone-fifth of a cent to manufacture. Pharmaceuticals provided a lucrative new opportunity for theoiligarchs, 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 Instituterecruited Simon Flexner, a pathology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, to serveas its director. His brother, Abraham, was an educator who was contracted by the CarnegieFoundation 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 theRockefeller and Carnegie Foundations were to shower on medical research in the comingyears, resulted in a sweeping overhaul of the American medical system. Naturopathicand homeopathic medicine, medical care focused on un-patentable, uncontrollable natural remediesand cures was now dismissed as quackery; only drug-based allopathic medicine requiring expensivemedical procedures and lengthy hospital stays was to be taken seriously. Narrator: The fortunes of Carnegie, Morgan and Rockefeller financed surgery, radiationand 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 takeoverof the medical schools. Well, the people that we’re talking about, Rockefeller and Carnegiein particular, came to the picture and said ‘We will put up money. ’ They offered tremendousamounts of money to the schools that would agree to cooperate with them. The donors saidto the schools: ‘We’re giving you all this money, now would it be too much to askif we could put some of our people on your Board of Directors to see that our money isbeing spent wisely?’ Almost overnight all of the major universities received large grantsfrom these sources and also accepted one, two or three of these people that I mentionedon their Board of Directors and the schools literally were taken over by the financialinterests 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 theirlaboratories, they were able to hire top-notch teachers, but at the same time as doing thatthey schewed the whole thing in the direction of pharmaceutical drugs. That was the efficiencyin philanthropy. The doctors from that point forward in history would be taught pharmaceutical drugs. Allof the great teaching institutions in America were captured by the pharmaceutical interestsin this fashion, and it’s amazing how little money it really took to do it. SOURCE: The Money Takeover Of MedicineThe oiligarchy birthed entire medical industries from their own research centers and then soldtheir own products from their own petrochemical companies as the “cure. ” It was FrankHoward, a Standard Oil of New Jersey executive, who would go on to persuade Alfred Sloan andCharles Kettering to donate their fortunes to the cancer center that would then beartheir name. As director of research at Sloan-Kettering, Howard appointed Cornelius Rhoads, a RockefellerInstitute pathologist, to develop his wartime research on mustard gas for the US Army intoa new cancer therapy. Under Rhoads’ leadership, nearly the entire program and staff of theChemical Warfare Service were reformed into the SKI drug development program, where theyworked on converting mustard gas into chemotherapy. And once again, the Rockefeller’s own snakeoil was being sold as a cancer cure-all. The oiligarchs’ interest in the burgeoning pharmaceutical industry converged in companieslike 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 the1930s and the cartel’s American operation, set up in cooperation with Standard Oil, includedon 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 industrialconcern 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 piecesremained intact and today BASF, one of its chemical offshoots, remains the largest chemicalcompany in the world, while Bayer and Sanofi, two of its pharmaceutical offshoots are amongthe largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. Not content merely to monopolize the fields of education and medicine, the same oiligarchicalinterests banded together to take control of America’s finances. In 1910 John D. RockefellerJr. ’s own father-in-law, Senator Nelson Aldrich, Frank Vanderlip of the National CityBank, and Paul Warburg, as well as various agents of J. P. Morgan, met in complete secrecyon Jekyll Island to hammer out the details of what would go on to become the FederalReserve, America’s central bank. The Fed, established in 1913, would be run by hand-pickedappointees 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 whenJames Stillman Rockefeller, the grandson of John D. ’s brother, was appointed directorof National City Bank. Meanwhile John D. ’s own grandson, David Rockefeller, would goon to take over Chase Manhattan Bank, the long-time banking partner of the StandardOil empire. In this move the Rockefellers’ story perfectly mirrored that of their fellow oiligarchs theRothschilds. 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 everyfield of human activity, the oiligarchs’ ambitions became even larger. This time, theirgoal was to consolidate control over the very food supply of the world itself, and onceagain they would use philanthropy as the cover for their business takeover. Narrator: The Green Revolution began in 1943 when plant geneticist Norman Borlaug and ateam of researchers arrived on Mexican soil. His goal was to improve agricultural techniquesand biotechnological methodologies which in turn would help alleviate starvation and improvethe living quality of developing nations. Creating new genetically modified strainsof 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 countriesfrom the brink of starvation. That’s exactly what happened. The agricultural innovations brought to the poverty-strickencountries 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 becomeself-sufficient. As the genetically modified crops thrived, farmers were able to use their increased incometo 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 agricultureand 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 Mexicothrough agriculture. SOURCE: Green Revolution Waging War Against HungerNorman Borlaug, needless to say, was a researcher for the Rockefeller Foundation, and the GreenRevolution, for whatever increase in yields it brought about, also created markets forthe 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, formedthe core of American “agribusiness,” a concept developed at Harvard Business Schoolin 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 worldagriculture into a captive market for their goods. From this perspective, the projectwas a runaway success. By the 1970s the Rockefeller Standard Oil network and its cronies in thenitrogen fertilizer industry (including DuPont, Dow Chemical, and Hercules Powder) had brokeninto markets around the world, markets conveniently forced open for them by the US governmentitself under President Johnson’s “Food for Peace” program, which mandated the useof 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 WorldBank 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 seldomtallied. Access to these debt-financed petrochemical-dependent technologies exacerbated the difference betweenthe rich landowning class and the landless peasants in countries like India, where landreform and abolition of usury were dropped from the political agenda after the GreenRevolution took over. Even then, the revolution’s main success, its increase in agricultural yields, has beenoversold. Yield growth across India actually slowed after the introduction of agribusiness. The environmental destruction is even more devastating. An overview in the December 2000edition of Current Science notes: “The gree n revolution has not only increased productivity,but it has also [produced] several negative ecological consequences such as depletionof lands, decline in soil fertility, soil salinization, soil erosion, deteriorationof environment, health hazards, poor sustainability of agricultural lands and degradation of biodiversity. Indiscriminate use of pesticides, irrigation and imbalanced fertilization has threatenedsustainability. ”The Rockefeller Foundation even acknowledges the critiques of the Green Revolution it fundedinto existence, insisting that “current initiatives take into account lessons learned. ”Even so, the Foundation continues to fund research and write reports on how to improveprospects for agribusiness investment in its target markets. As egregious as the Green Revolution was and continues to be, however, in many ways itwas just the prelude to an even more ambitious project: the Gene Revolution. Now the projectis not merely to monopolize the technologies, supplies and chemical inputs for agricultureworldwide, but to monopolize the food supply itself through the replacement of the world’snatural seeds with patentable genetically modified crops. The players involved in this “Gene Revolution” are almost identical to the players in theGreen Revolution, with I. G. Farben offshoots Bayer CropScience and BASF PlantScience minglingwith 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 interestsin promoting GM crops around the world can be seen in the bewildering array of researchinstitutes, industry associations, and “consultative groups” devoted to the case. The Rockefeller-fundedInternational Rice Research Institute (IRRI), the Rockefeller/Monsanto/USAID brainchildInternational Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA), theRockefeller/Ford/World Bank created Consultative Group of International Agricultural Research(CGIAR) and dozens of other bland, benign-sounding organizations research and promote GM cropsin 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 geneticallymodified Roundup Ready soybeans before demanding royalties on the crops that were by then alreadygrowing. DuPont then took over, magnanimously beginning a “Protein for Life” programmeto 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 cropsare foisted on emerging economies through “food aid,” usually during times of faminewhen those countries are especially vulnerable. Only a handful of countries like Zambia orAngola have outright rejected this GMO takeover of their food supply, generously subsidizedby the US government to the benefit of the agribusiness cartel. Conclusion: Monopolizing LifeFrom cutthroat pioneers of the early oil industry to Machiavellian social engineers and geopoliticsschemers, the oiligarchs have come a long way since the days of Devil Bill’s snakeoil cure-alls. But his use of every form of deception and trickery to swindle the publicinformed 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 thatbuilt the oil industry–the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds, the British and Dutch royalfamilies–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 wasmuch greater than a mere oil monopoly: it was the quest to monopolize all aspects oflife. To erect the perfect system of control over every aspect of society, every sectorfrom which any threat of competition to their power could emerge. They had been remarkably, almost unbelievably, successful. From oil well to gas pump, farmto fork, hospital to pharmaceutical, drill rig to dollar bill, there was almost no aspectof 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 pathfor 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 oiligarchsperfected and abandoned long ago, are about to fall right into their hands yet again.
