Jon Christian Ryter - Are the Sauds Really America's Friends?

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From The Mailbag

20 years

n seizing the financial records of several oil-money financed Muslim charities, educational and benevolent organizations in the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation found strong evidence suggesting that many of these organizations—some of which are headquartered in the United States—are actually conduits whose primary function is to covertly funnel money to Islamic terrorist groups around the world. Among those wealthy contributors are the Saudi royal family. Spokesmen for the Saudi royal family admit that the al Sauds contribute vast amounts to several Muslim charities—like the Red Crescent and others—but, as far as the Sauds knew (the spin goes), their money was used exclusively for the benevolent purposes promoted by the charities.
     However, al Qaeda financial records found in deserted Afghan hideouts and seized from Muslim charities in the United States suggest otherwise. These records reveal that the Saudi royal family was the source of millions of dollars which made its way not only into the hands of Osama bin Laden as he prepared to wage his extremist Islamic Jihad against America, but was used to finance the activities of Yassar Arafat’s personal Palestinian terrorist group from which the homicide bombers arose, the Palestinian Liberation Front, the Hamas and the Hezbollah. The Saudi royal family even provides “pensions” for the families of homicide bombers who are viewed as martyrs.
     The financial databases found and examined by the FBI clearly show that all the time the Saudi government was paying lip service to the United States (while denying them the right to fly missions against the al Qaeda and Taliban in Afghanistan from Saudi soil), the Sauds were playing both ends against the middle. The reason is obvious. Being Muslims, they are obligated to stand with their Islamic brothers—or face a possible fatwah from an Islamic cleric. (Extremist muslim clerics have issued death warrants on the al Sauds at least three times since 1991—once because the Saudi royal family allowed the United States to bring female soldiers on Saudi soil.) At the same time, the Sauds need both the economic and military strength of America to protect them from their land and oil hungry Muslim brothers in Baghdad, Tehran and Damascus who want to use oil as a weapon in their economicJihad against the industrialized nations of the world which control the world’s most lethal war machines and equipment.
      First and foremost the royal family, like all Saudi citizens, are Muslims. Some might be Sunni and others Shi’ites, but they are all Islamic. In the Arab world, the religious “freedom” rhetoric being spouted from the desert sands notwithstanding, in the Muslim mind, there is only one God, Allah, and one religion—Islam. The extremist Islamic view (which, granted, is not shared by all Muslims) is that those who practice religions other than Islam (or are atheists or agnostics) are heathens and must be converted or killed. Muslims who assist either the Jews or any heathen who opts to help the Jews must also be condemned to death—usually through the issuance of a fatwa by a Muslim cleric who, under Islamic law, issues the death warrants which are to be acted upon by all loyal Islamics.
     As more evidence of Saudi duplicity surfaces, pressure mounted from liberal quarters in the United States for the Bush Administration to distance itself from Crown Prince Abdullah and King Fahd—even as Bush entertained the Crown Prince at his ranch in Crawford, Texas.
On May 6, 2002 Saudi Arabia joined its Arab neighbors on the peninsula in a boycott designed to shun all American products ranging from cigarettes to Big Macs and that taste-tempting chicken cooked with 23 secret herbs and spices. The call to boycott American products extends beyond the Arab States and Muslim nations. Islamic civic organizations, student groups and professional organizations are calling for Muslims in every nation in the world—including the United States—to shun American products in favor of imports from nations which are not “tied to the hip” of Israel, or that do not export goods to the Jewish State. Organizers of the boycott are targeting American corporations that are perceived as supporters or Israel, or supporters of the Bush Administration, or companies that have channeled aid, in one form or another, to the Israeli State.
     Hardest hit thus far are restaurant franchises in the Mideast and other nations with large Islamic populations. In addition to Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonalds are such food brands as Pizza Hut, Taco Bell and Baskin Robbins. KFC in Oman reported sales have already fallen by 45%. McDonalds, in the Omani capital of Muscat have noted their sales are off 65%.
     Mideastern smokers, who would have traded a camel for a “Camel” a year ago, or who believed the oasis in the desert was Marlboro Country, have turned off American cigarettes as Turkish cigarette sales rise in the Land of Islam. According to a Washington Times report published on May 8, a senior executive at Kuwaiti-based Americana (a corporation which owns licenses for several American franchises, pizza sales at the Kuwaiti-owned Pizza Hut franchises fell 40% in Egypt and 45% in Jordan. Overall, Americana’s sales are off 20% throughout the world. Mohmoud el-Kaissouri, an executive dealing with the service sector dealing with 22 American restaurant franchises in the Muslim world admitted to wire service reporters that its getting very serious. “The number of [Muslim patrons] going into these restaurants is less and less every day despite all that we are doing.” el-Kaissouri’s group represents McDonald’s, Kenny Rogers’ Roasters and Little Caesar’s Pizza.
     In Saudi Arabia, Coca Cola was the worst hit of American branded products, with sales off some 60%. Pepsi Cola sales were off 45%.
According to Ibrahim Mahrous, the sales manager for Ben Dawood Supermarkets, Muslim customers are leaving Proctor & Gamble products on the shelves and are increasingly buying inferior brands made in Europe and China. The sale of Pampers dropped 35%. In Morocco, a campaign has been launched by two newspapers to boycott the American dollar as well, asking Moroccan businesses to refuse to accept dollars. “Boycott the dollar in your operations for the sake of the Palestinians,” the headlines challenge. “Whenever possible, opt for the Euro.”
     In addition to the move to boycott the use of dollars (that will impact no one except the Muslims who will lose on the exchange rates), the Egyptian Doctor’s Syndicate, headed by Dr. Hamdy el-Sayed, sent a list to every physician in the Syndicate that contains the product names of every American pharmaceutical product which has an alternate generic made either in the Arab world or in Europe or Asia. “We understand this is not economically effective,” el-Sayed admitted, “because people are going to continue to buy American goods. This action is more of a symbolic [gesture] than a real effect.” Whether it is symbolic or not, hospitals in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan—America’s Arab friend in the Mideast—have stopped buying drugs from American drug makers completely, including vaccines that are needed to prevent childhood diseases.
     With the advent of the Arab consumer boycott of American products, righteously indignant American anger began to fester in the United States until finally the question was raised: “What if Americans decided to boycott Arab oil?” Conservative radio and TV talk show hosts raised the question, and scrambled to put together lists of gasoline producers or distributors who did not buy their oil from the Arab world in order to provide their listeners with a list of gas stations they should patronize.
     Their approach to list-compilation was as simplistic as it was inaccurate. International “American” brand names like Standard Oil, Mobil-Exxon, BP-Amoco, and Chevron-Texaco (the most high profile, best advertised Seven Sisters brands) were listed among those to be boycotted since their partnership arrangements with the Arabs are well known. Standard Oil and its wholly-owned subsidiary spin-offs from the 1911 anti-trust suit that made the Rockefellers’ break the company apart (Exxon, Mobil, Amoco, Chevron, Atlantic Richfield, Sunoco, Sohio, British Petroleum, and Continental Oil [Conoco]), Royal Dutch Shell and the Rothschild/Nobel oil companies that dominated the Russian oil industry since the first oil strike around Baku on the Caspian Sea, developed the oil fields on the Arabian peninsula and shared ownership with the oil shieks who ran those feudal nations. Armand Hammer, who was the ‘visible” owner of Soviet-backed Occidential Petroleum (which funneled money to the Gore family for over 50 years), laid down heavy bribes to gain oil leases in Iraq, Kuwait and Iran.
     It would seem, on the surface, that by ruling out a handful of major transnational oil companies it could be assumed that by bypassing them and patronizing the smaller “independent” gas stations we would achieve the objective of boycotting Arab oil.
     Not so.
     When John D. Rockefeller formed Standard Oil he understood the basic law of economics that says to control “demand” it is necessary to control “supply.” Once a corporation gains control the supply of a commodity, it can, and will, manipulate demand. And, that is precisely what Rockefeller did. From the early days along Oil Creek, Pennsylvania Rockefeller experienced hefty financial losses caused by too many drillers producing too much oil and driving down the price of crude. The same was true of the refiners who processed the crude oil into kerosene. With a glut of crude oil, and an over-abundance of refiners processing crude into kerosene, it cost more to refine the crude oil into kerosene than kerosene wholesalers like Rockefeller could get for the product on the street.
     To control the flow of crude to the refineries, and the processing of crude into kerosene, Standard Oil first attacked the methods of distribution of crude from the wellhead to the refinery, bankrupting one driller after another, and then buying out the bankrupted drillers. The same was true of the refiners. One-by-one Standard Oil went after them, driving the price of kerosene down in those markets until the refinery went bankrupt. Then Standard Oil would buy up the defunct refinery—and hire the refinery owner. By 1875 Standard Oil controlled 85% of the world’s production of kerosene because it controlled 85% of the world’s production of crude oil.
     When the first oil strike occurred at the Caspian Sea port city of Baku in Russia in 1873, Robert Nobel of the Swiss munitions family was in the area buying walnut for rifle stocks to fill a contract his brother Alfred had with the Russian government to supply rifles to the Russian army. Sensing the opportunity, Nobel forgot about the walnut grove he had been sent to purchase and opened an oil refinery in Baku instead.
     By 1879 the Nobels had more of their resources tied up in oil than in munitions, forming the Nobel Brothers Petroleum Producing Company. They built an 8-mile long pipeline from the Baku oil field to the Caspian Sea where they loaded oil onto the world’s first oil tanker, the Zoroaster. Within the next five years, they would own a rail system complete with tank cars and storage depots—all financed by Baron Alphonse de Rothschild, the Tsar’s banker.
     The Nobel-Rothschild alliance drove Standard Oil out of Russia.
It was Rockefeller’s only commercial defeat, and Standard Oil was not prepared to roll over and play dead. Rockefeller and Rothschild would continue to fight until the Boleshevik Revolution (which was financed by Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Mellon and other capitalist entrepreneurs in order to gain control of the emerging economy of the natural resources rich nation) ended the competition when Lenin nationalized the entire economy and closed the door to any capitalist entrepreneurs from profiting in the new Soviet Union.
     As oil was discovered to be a universal commodity found almost everywhere under the crust of the earth, the Nobel-Rothschild and Rockefeller forces scrambled to claimstake every wellhead in the world in order to exercise sufficient control over the output of oil at the wellhead and to the refineries to protect their profits. As supply increases, demand—and profits—decrease.
     As oil strikes became as frequent as mosquito bites at a Sunday afternoon picnic, the internal combustion engine was invented, and the automobile became a fact of life in America, adding new demands for fossil fuels—and a new monetary incentive for wildcat speculators.
     As major oil strikes occurred in Oklahoma and Texas in the United States and in the South Pacific, Standard Oil began losing control. An anti-trust suit was filed against Standard Oil by Theodore Roosevelt in 1906. After languishing in the courts for five years, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the breakup of Standard Oil 1911. However, unlike any modern day breakup, it was allowed to keep all of its spin-off companies. While Standard Oil had the appearance of being a much smaller company with whom independent oil companies like Sinclair, Phillips 66, Pennzoil, Ashland Oil, Getty, and other national and regional brands could compete, the reality is, Standard Oil still owned the oil business in the United States. And with the Rothschild-Nobel cartel and the Marcus Samuel family (which owned Shell), Rockefeller and the Rothschilds controlled the global oil industry. The initial oil exploration in the Mideast was done by the British at the close of World War I when Great Britain “won” the Arabian peninsula after defeating the Turkish Ottoman Empire in Palestine.
     Standard Oil’s Seven Sisters joined the British in the Mideast, buying oil leases in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Yemen. By doing business with the most powerful Muslim shieks, and sharing the oil revenues equally with those Islamic chieftains, the political leaders of the Mideast nations were born through alliances with Rockefeller and Rothschild—and not through diplomatic relations with the governments of England and the United States.
     It would appear, on the surface, that if a consumer wanted to boycott Arab oil he or she could simply drive past every Mobil, Exxon, Chevron, BP, Amoco, Texaco, Sunoco, ARCO, Conoco, CalTex or Standard Oil station and be reasonably certain that they had boycotted 85% of the Arab oil coming into the United States. But, appearances can be deceiving in this age of mergers and private branding.
     If you ever bought your gasoline from Reelo and Sello convenience stores, you bought Arab oil because you were doing business with the Seven Sisters. Most independent convenience store chains, in fact, buy their gasoline from the largest refiners—which likely are owned by the Seven Sisters. So even though the gasoline has a “local” label, the reality is that crude from the Mideast probably made the gasoline in the tank of your car.
     Sohio (Standard Oil of Ohio) and British Petroleum (which was Standard Oil of England) began buying up existing truck stop/restaurants and gas station/convenience stores during the OPEC oil crisis of the 1970s to gain the retail profits and the Seven Sisters continued the practice after the oil crisis passed. Convenience stores and highway truck stops/gas station/restaurants were good business. Sohio bought the McLean, Virginia-based Scot branded stations. The best performing stores were branded as BP, the marginal stores were branded as Boron. In the 1980s, British Petroleum bought Truckstops of America, then adding Gulf’s southeastern units as Gulf oil regrouped. Then they added “Gas&Go,” a Michigan chain, and Gibbs truckstops in the northeast.
     In the meantime, Chevron-Texaco formed retail partnerships with Shell Oil called Equilon/Motiva (which are joint Texaco-Shell/SaudiAramco ventures). SaudiAramco is the original Saudi-Rockefeller partnership venture.
     As British Petroleum began buying up Gulf, Gulf sold many of its units to independent Cumberland Farms. Today, Chevron-Texaco is a shareholder in Cumberland, and Gulf lubricants are now sold by Chevron. Texaco’s retail marketing (at least until 2004) in the United States is being done by Equilon/Motiva. Independent refiner Ashland Oil (located in Ashland, Kentucky) decided to focus on its petrochemical products and merged its Ashland gas stations with Marathon in 1998. Marathon assumed Ashland’s SuperAmerica convenience store chain. Mobil Oil attempted to take over Marathon in 1981. Cash-starved Marathon found the money they needed from U.S. Steel to keep Mobil from absorbing them. Flush with U.S. Steel money, Marathon bought Ecol in 1984, then Webster-Value, then adding Speedway convenience stores. In 1984 USX-Marathon-Ashland formed Emro Marketing to manage their growing convenience store dynasty. Their marketing philosophy was to keep the regional brands they were buying whenever it was practical to do so. USX-Marathon-Ashland bought Globe Oil in 1985, and with it, Starvin’ Marvin. They added Port Oil, Golden Imperial, United, Colonial-Progressive, Tulsa, and WakeUp. It would seem that here was an independent gas station America could patronize without fear of buying Arab oil. U.S. Steel, a Carnegie corporation that fell under the management umbrella of J.P. Morgan, (has now merged with Rockefeller’s Citibank), and is a Standard Oil partner in many financial deals all over the world. J.P. Morgan now has its own oil holdings in the Mideast and elsewhere around the globe—including in England and China. Independent Phillips 66 brand was purchased by Conoco in a merger in which the new company was called Conoco-Phillips. Conoco operates both Kayo and Jet “independent” gas stations. Pressed by Seven Sisters competition in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Pennzoil agreed to merge with Getty Oil. Before the deal could be consummated, Texaco purchased Getty Oil before the merger was fully completed. Pennzoil sued and won, using its settlement money to purchase Jiffy Lube in 1989. From 1990 on, gasoline sales became less important to Pennzoil who devoted its corporate sales effort to lubricants. In 1998 Pennzoil merged with Quaker State. Earlier this year an agreement was struck in which Royal Dutch Shell assumed Pennzoil-Quaker State—and with it, Jiffy Lube.
     Phillips 66, an old respected American independent, purchased 76 and Circle K convenience stores in September, 2001. The Circle K deal joined Phillips 66 in a partnership with Exxon in the New England States and in Arizona, and with Mobil in the mid-Atlantic States.
     It is becoming increasingly difficult to know which “independent” in the United States is really an “independent” or whether it’s simply an acquired regional brand of one of the Seven Sisters, or is an American subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell or the Rothschild or Nobel European oil interests. Just as the Baby Bells are attempting to regroup into a single major transnational telecommunications entity, so are the Seven Sisters. And because it is, it is impossible to tell where the gasoline you are pumping into your gas tank came from—even if the gas station you frequent is called SuperAmerica, Marathon (whose slogan is “An American Company Serving America”) or Mom’s Apple Pie Gas & American Flag Company—unless that gasoline retailer drills and refines its own oil. Thus, while it is possible to single out oil companies with major oil lease holdings in the Mideast, it is impossible to boycott gasoline refined from Arab oil since most of the gasoline sold in the United States is refined from Mideast oil—and that which is not is refined from crude stored in tanks that have no country of origin. It is unlikely that those in the processing plants responsible for refining the crude into gasoline, kerosene, diesel fuel, fuel oil or jet aircraft fuel have any idea of the country of origin of the crude oil they are converting into fuel or heating oil—or that they even care. For that reason, it is virtually impossible to boycott Arab oil. You can, however, make a political statement and “punish” the transnational oil barons by boycotting the Seven Sister brands, Gulf, and Shell and allowing their lesser known subsidiaries to reap the profits and denying them to shareholders of the the major brands. While you can’t keep the proceeds from the sale of petroleum products from ending up in the pockets of the Standard Oil, you can impact the stock price of Mobil-Exxon, BP-Amoco, Chevron-Texaco, ARCO, Sunoco, and Standard Oil since shareholders have a tendency to sell stock off when their dividends fall. (Most blue chip stock investors have these holdings in their portfolios strictly for income purposes. If the stocks stop delivering the needed quarterly income checks, the holders of the portfolios exchange them for other income producing blue chips.)
     By purchasing its independent gas and oil competitors the Seven Sisters, Royal Dutch Shell and the Rothschild/Nobel oil interests have been able to better control independent oil exploration in North America by limiting the number of “players” who are opting to drill—or reducing the number of those with the financial ability to lobby Congress against the restrictive environmental laws being pushed by the ecoalarmist groups funded by Standard Oil and the Seven Sisters who actually want to curtail new development to prevent gluts of oil from shifting the tenuous balance between supply and demand and thus, reducing the global price of oil by the barrel.
     Using environmentalists and ecoalarmists like former Vice President Al Gore to impose costly environmental regulations on the refinery business, the global oil giants have been able to slow down the refining of crude into gasoline—and at the same time, by adding cumbersome, costly and usually unnecessary regulations, they have further burdened those who can least afford it—the independent American drillers and gasoline refiners.
     Since 1997, when Bill Clinton and Al Gore began to implement the pollution standards imposed by the Kyoto Protocol (the UN’s unratified Global Warming Treaty) most of America’s independent oil refineries across the nation were forced to close down because they were unable to meet the emissions standards mandated not by Congress but by the Clinton-Gore Administration. Once the small oil refineries were forced to close, small independent drillers and well-owners no longer had the means to get their oil to market since the large transnational oil conglomerates had no need for the cheap American oil.
     Unrefined oil backed up at the nation’s largest refineries and the cost of gasoline and fuel oil began to creep up until, in the summer of 2000, gasoline approached $2.00 a gallon in most markets. In markets where anti-pollutants or ethanol had to be added to the retail product, the cost of gasoline skyrocketed even higher. Afraid to take the heat for their own regulations, Clinton and Gore blamed the high prices on a shortage of oil from our “friends” in the Mideast and on the greed of the transnationalist refineries which were trying to keep “supply” on the short side of “demand” in order to keep the price of gasoline from dropping as it does when supply exceeds demand. Gore, campaigning for the presidency at the time, demanded that Clinton release 500 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to provide economical heating oil “for seniors on fixed incomes” as winter approached. (Actually, since Gore’s ecological agenda created the problem, his statement was made not because winter was approaching, but because the elections were approaching and Gore wanted to make sure he had the elderly vote.)
     Clinton and Gore made a very public show of taking 500 million barrels of oil from the U.S. Navy’s strategic oil reserve in order to provide low-priced heating oil for the elderly—and then sold all 500 million barrels of crude to the former Soviet Union because the American refineries were so backlogged with raw crude that their storage tanks could not hold any more oil.
     At the same time, with the media still crying about horrific oil shortages that would drive up the prices of gasoline, kerosene and fuel oil during the peak winter months, Bill Clintowas under extreme pressure from several environmentalist groups (who are funded by The Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Trust, the Pew Foundation, the Ford Foundation) to restrict new oil exploration near Prudhoe Bay in the Beaufort Sea. Geologists discovered the most massive oil reserve discovered in American “territory” to date. The oil strike was found on the North Slope just below the Arctic Circle. Geologists estimate that there is enough oil under that northeast corner of Alaska to serve 100% of the fuel needs for the United States for 20 years, or replace all of our Mideast oil imports for 30 years. (Today, America imports 60% of its oil from other nations, with most of it coming from the Mideast.)
While environmentalists (including Mobil-Exxon and BP-Amoco) have suggested that drillers would destroy some 20 million acres of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and with that destruction, displace the Porcupine Caribou which mate along the coastline every spring (when drillers are attempting to drill in 2,000 acres—about the size of a regional airport). The Gwich’in Eskimos who depend on the Porcupine Caribou for their food supply and winter shelter are rather two-faced about the potential environmental impact of drilling in the Prudhoe Bay tundra—something that has been going on for a decade since they expected BP-Amoco and Mobil-Exxon to drill for oil on their land...with the Gwich’ins’ leasing the oil rights to the transnational oil companies. (BP-Amoco and Mobil-Exxon decided there were cheaper places to drill and let their oil leases expire.) If oil wells are drilled in the Refuge, it will be on land owned by the Inupiat tribe. The Gwich’ins will not gain a penny of oil revenue. Because they are not happy campers, the Gwich’ins have protested to Washington, arguing that the drilling will be disastrous to the caribou. In reality, that is not true since drilling has been going on there for the past decade. Instead of seeing the herds depleted due to the intrusion of man, the Porcupine Caribou herds have increased 34% since drilling began on the North Slope.
     When drilling began on the North Slope, geologists estimated that the oil field contained approximately 9 billion barrels. To date, 13 billion barrels have been sucked from under the tundra—and the wells are still producing at full capacity. Geologists have estimated that there are at least 16 billion barrels under the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge which Bill Clinton illegally declared to be a “national monument” to prevent drilling—at the insistence of environmentalists funded by Seven Sisters.
     Tapping into the oil reserves beneath the illegally designated national reserve would completely eliminate America’s dependency on Saudi oil. The Seven Sisters and the other large transnational oil conglomerates with American sounding names (but without any patriotic loyalty to the United States since they consider themselves to be multi-national rather than national corporations) have declared they are opposed to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge only because there are more oil fields where oil can be purchased more cheaply.
     That is known as a “tongue-in-cheek-truth.” Since the wells in the Mideast are already pumping oil, it goes without saying that Saudi oil is cheaper than drilling wells in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; then running a pipeline from the oil field to the pipeline running from the North Slope into the Standard Oil-owned Alaskan Pipeline where the independent drillers in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would be forced to pay a stiff surcharge to transport non-Seven Sisters oil through the pipeline.
     Although the price of gasoline at the pump is steadily rising and will continue to rise through the summer when the demand for gasoline becomes the greatest, our Arab trading partners: Saudi Arabia has oil reserves of approximately 300 billion barrels. Kuwait, which we liberated during the Gulf War, has reserves totalling about 125 billion barrels. The United Arab Emirates has approximately 100 billion barrels, and Venezuela (which is an OPEC member) has reserves of about 50 billion barrels. Iran and Iraq are sitting on 125 billion barrels of oil between them. (See “The End of Cheap Oil,” by Colin J. Campbell and Jean H. Laherrere; Scientific American © March, 1998.) (http://dieoff.org/page140.htm)
     While there is enough retrievable oil under the crust of the Earth and under the oceans—including the South China Sea and the Arctic Ocean which conceals oil reserves that surpass that which has been found under the desert sands of the Mideast—to provide mankind with all of its “fossil fuel” and natural gas needs for the next five hundred years, everyone knows that carbon fuels (oil and coal) and natural gas cannot replenish themselves. Every million barrels expended is a million barrels that cannot be replaced—ever. And, nobody understands that better than the Rockefeller Foundation.
For the past one hundred years Standard Oil has been carefully gauging the depletion of this critical resource. In 1900 Standard Oil was convinced that without careful conservation, the world’s supply of oil would be depleted in 50 to 100 years. Linked to the consumption of carbon fuels was people. By 1960 Standard Oil became convinced that the world was producing too many people and that those people were consuming the world’s resources too fast. The Rockefeller Foundation financed several population control studies and decided that by the year 2000, if left unchecked, the world would no longer be able to feed itself...and, nonreplenishable fossil fuels would be dangerously depleted. In 1998 the Scientific Journal roughly estimated that there are about 1,000 billion barrels of oil left to be extracted from the Earth by “traditional” means. The estimate was extrapolated from production figures from older declining wells, added to cumulative projections of exploratory wells being drilled in other areas. Finally, the scientists checked the projections made in exploratory fields drilled a decade ago and compare the actual flow with the projections.
     Clearly the estimates of the world’s reserves are somewhat “crimped,” since environmentalists have stymied oil exploration in the United States, Alaska and the Arctic region controlled by the United States and Canada. Further, there has been little new exploration in the former Soviet Union (whose oil reserves will likely rival the Mideast when fully exploited). Very likely, the estimates of the scientific community that there is only around 1,000 billion barrels of retrievable oil left is an understatement of as much as 50%. The problem with these projections is that new well exploration has fallen dramatically not only in the United States but in the northern hemisphere.
     The Scientific Journal estimated, in 1998, that within the next decade (the one we are living in) the supply of oil (due to deliberately curbed production worldwide) will be unable to keep up with demand, and the next oil “crunch” will not be temporary. It will mark the beginning of a steady and very likely sharp escalation in the price of carbon fuels that will see temporary reprieves caused by temporary gluts. With diminishing supplies of a commodity controlled by the world’s largest, most powerful corporations, there is no doubt that [a] they need to conserve supply since it is their primary source of revenue, and [b] they need to increase the level of revenue they are receiving from their oil leases even as they reduce the supply of oil available for sale throughout the world.
     Anyway you look at it, the cheap ride is over.
     Standard Oil and the Seven Sisters have an established track record of controlling supply in order to increase demand since the higher the demand, the higher the profits. America’s carbon fuel dependency on the Arabs or the former Soviet Union—both of whom have the ability to economically blackmail the United States—can be eliminated for the next 30 years by tapping into the oil reserves under the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. America’s largest oil companies (which originally owned most of the oil leases in the Prudhoe Bay area) have been strangely silent on the debate other than to claim that there are many potential oil fields around the world that can be more developed much more cost effectively than those in ANWR.
None of those oil fields, however, are in the United States.
     That is by choice.
     As America’s oil giants spent billions of dollars in oil exploration elsewhere, they have also contributed billions of dollars to environmental groups at home to protest new oil exploration in America. In addition, the environmentalists were funded by the global oil giants to lobby the United States government during the eight Clinton-Gore years to shut down existing producing wells because, they claimed, those wells threatened the ecosystem in the United States. Further, the environmentalists lobbied the Clinton-Gore Administration to enact the oppressively strict greenhouse gas emissions standards that had been written into the Kyoto Protocol by Vice President Al Gore and Assistant Secretary of State for Global Affairs, Timothy Wirth. The Gore-Wirth regulations, implemented by the Environmental Protection Agency [EPA], made it a financial hardship for small, independent oil refineries in the country to comply, effectively shutting most of them down, and creating a domino affect that forced almost every small oil producer in the country to shut down their pumps as well.
     It isn’t that the global oil giants missed the point of the argument—dependency on Arab oil—it is that those transnational corporations that were born and bred in the United States have renounced their American citizenship. These multi-national conglomerates (whether oil companies, industrial manufacturers, or the makers of blue jeans or sneakers) claim to be “citizens of the world.” They now argue that while they pay taxes to the United States and several other governments around the world, they owe no allegiance to any nation. Interdependence with all other nations of the world is needed to build the infrastructure of the global community.
The transnational industrialists and bankers who are constructing the financial infrastructure of the global economy are convinced [a] that the world has too many people—and that the overabundance of humanity is destroying the the delicate balance of the global ecosystem and, as a result, people are inadvertently causing global warming; and [b] that the use of carbon fuels [the primary source of income of the oil giants who finance the advocacy of the environmentalists] is building up greenhouse gases which, in turn, is causing global warming.
     Arguing that carbon fuels are primarily responsible for global warming (which is, itself, a myth fostered by the oil companies who need to force consumers to use less oil—and pay more for it)—and conscious of the fact that carbon fuels (not fossil fuels since oil is not “dinosaur residue”) are not replenishable, the oil companies with an eye on the future—not the next decade or two or three, but the next two, three or four centuries or more—need to condition the consumers to conserve this irreplaceable commodity.
Conservation means using less—a lot less.
     The trick for the oil giants is to force the world to use about half the oil they currently consume. Since the demand for gasoline and other petroleum products will not fall in direct relation to the declining supply over the next decade, prices for gasoline, motor oil, industrial lubricants, and other petrochemical products will spike dramatically.
     By the end of this decade, the cheap ride will be gone forever.
And the American consumer will be woefully reminiscing about the good old days when gasoline cost less than $3.00 a gallon.