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20 years

robably the best thing that ever happened to John D. Rockefeller, Sr. was to be sued by the US government under the Sherman Anti-trust Act of 1896 when the Justice Department filed suit in federal court on Nov. 18, 1906 to dissolve Standard Oil. By the summer of 1907, the antitrust action had spread into 7 federal and 6 State courthouses (Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi, Ohio, Tennessee and Texas). John D. Rockefeller, Sr. was 67 years old when the action was filed. He recalled wondering if his vast wealth would ever afford him a moment's peace and solitude before he died.

It would be 5 years before the US Supreme Court would hear The United States v Standard Oil Company and rule against Rockefeller. Four hundred forty-four witnesses offered 11 million words of testimony to the court. That testimony would fill 12,000 pages. Over 1,374 exhibits would be made part of the evidence against the oil mogul. The Supreme Court case resulted from the decision of US District Court Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis who fined Standard Oil $29.24 million on August 3, 1907, and ordered the company broke apart. Rockefeller, who was playing golf in Cleveland, Ohio when Landis' decision was announced, told his golf foursome that "...Landis will be dead long before that fine is paid." Standard Oil appealed Landis' decision. A federal appellate court judge, Peter S. Grosscup revoked the fine but left the breakup intact. Standard Oil took the case to the US Supreme Court. In the end, at 4:00 p.m. on May 15, 1911, US Supreme Court Chief Justice Edward White began reading the 20 thousand word opinion. White summarily ordered Rockefeller to dismantle the world's most powerful corporation, making each subsidiary a separate corporation. Rockefeller, who was not in court to hear the decision, did not appear upset when he heard the ruling. He was playing golf with a friend, Father J.P. Lennon, a Catholic priest, when he was notified. "Do you have any money?" Rockefeller reportedly asked the priest. Lennon asked why. "Buy Standard Oil," Rockefeller answered. It was sound advise. Had he done so, Father Lennon could have retired from the priesthood with a comfortable nest egg.

When the US Supreme Court made its decision in 1911, Royal Dutch Oil and Shell Oil had just merged to form the second largest oil company in the world. In addition, the newly-created Anglo-Persian Oil Company was tapping into the vast, new oil fields in the Mideast and, in the United States, wildcatters were bringing in one oil gusher after another in Oklahoma and Texas. Sitting in the backseat was Standard Oil which had been distracted for five years. Where Standard Oil had pumped 32% of America's crude oil in 1899, it controlled less than 14% by 1911. Standard Oil controlled 86% of all the oil refining in the world in 1906. When Judge White broke up Standard Oil, Rockefeller only controlled 70% of the oil refining in the United States and even less in Europe. In 1910, gasoline sales surpassed kerosene sales for the first time in history as America discovered Henry Ford's affordable Model T. The love affair between man and the internal combustion engine had begun.

White broke Standard Oil into seven separate entities. Rockefeller was not ordered by the court to divest himself or his shareholders of any of the new properties. Where John D. Rockefeller owned one mega oil company on May 14, 1911, he owned six giant oil companies and one large petrochemical company on May 15, 1911. Overnight, Rockefeller's wealth multiplied seven times over. US Senator Robert LaFollette [R-WI] was among the Congressmen and Senators in the Supreme Court building on May 15 to hear the court's decision over the fate of Standard Oil. LaFollette shook his head as the decision was read. "I fear that the court has done what the [Standard Oil Trust] wanted it to do and what Congress has refused to do," he later told reporters.

White was the author of the "rule of reason" doctrine with respect to the Sherman Antitrust Act. The Sherman Antitrust Act was specifically legislated to break Standard Oil apart. Up until that time, the law had never been applied against any other company. (During World War I, the Sherman Antitrust Act would be applied against several unions under the umbrella of both the AFL and the CIO.) The "rule of reason" doctrine was a principle by which the courts would outlaw only those restraints of trade that violated the public interest.

The spin-offs were initially called the Rockefeller stepchildren, but as they found their place in the market, they became known collectively as the Seven Sisters. The primary entity—the flagship stepchild—Standard Oil of New Jersey, ultimately became Esso, and then Exxon. Today, after a myriad of splits and mergers, Exxon-Mobil (figuratively it remains corporate Standard Oil using a moniker), Chevron-Texaco (now officially Chevron), and BP-Amoco are the dominant oil players not only in the United States but around the world. And along with Royal Dutch Shell (the Rothschild- Nobel-Samuels oil dynasty in Europe), these companies today pretty much control the price of gasoline, fuel oil, natural gas, diesel fuel and kerosene around the globe. They are the price fixers—and the price gougers. And, they are completely invisible. When they gouge the public, either the oil jobbers, the station owners or the Arabs get the blame.

With the advent of the automobile at the turn of the 20th century, oil stocks skyrocketed. But the stock of the Seven Sisters, which had been depressed for most of the 5 years that Standard Oil was in court, simply exploded. Standard Oil of New Jersey inherited Standard Oil's vast refinery system, but no oil reserves to supply them, forcing that entity into a close collaboration with its siblings. Atlantic Refining Company (ARCO) would hit the charts in the 1970s for creating a line of graphite-based motor oils. It would be absorbed by BP-Amoco. Standard Oil of New York became Mobil. Standard Oil of Indiana became Amoco (which would ultimately be purchased by British Petroleum [BP]. Standard Oil of California became known as Chevron. Atlantic Refining split, becoming both Atlantic Richfield and Sun Oil, or Sunoco. Continental Oil, another California Standard Oil subsidiary, became Conoco. Conoco would buy Phillips, becoming Conoco-Phillips. Chesebrough-Ponds, a petro-cosmetic company that used petroleum products, was the 7th spawn of an evil father. While Chesebrough™ and Ponds™ created a myriad of creams, salves, benzine, and paraffin products for canning and candle-making, probably its best known product today remains Vaseline™ Petroleum Jelly. Also part of the Seven Sisters are British Petroleum [BP] and Standard Oil of Ohio, or its acronym, SOHIO. All totaled, with the divestitures of entities within the Seven Sisters, there were ten stepchildren although, slowly, they are morphing back into a single supra entity. Whether that supra entity will wear the name Standard Oil or Exxon-Mobil remains to be seen. Since the name Standard Oil still carries a 150 year old stigma it is likely that the Rockefeller clan will allow the name Standard Oil to slip quietly into history like an embarrasing old relative.

The History

John D. Rockefeller, Sr. was an enigma in the oil industry. Without a doubt he was recognized as the most ruthless businessman in the world. Yet he was a devout, and very pious, charitable churchgoing Christian for his entire life.

On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean was the most respected and trusted businessmen in Europe—Baron Alphonse de Rothschild. The deepening clash between the oil titan Rockefeller and the banker, Rothschild would ultimately bring about the collapse of a nation, the prolongation of World War I—even after Germany and Austria had surrendered—and the interjection of the most oppressive political system ever devised by man over half of the world. By the end of the 19th century, oil would become the most valuable commodity in the world. Those who owned the portals from which it was pumped from the ground virtually controlled the Earth and all of its inhabitants.

Oil was not discovered "by accident" at Titusville, Pennsylvania on Sunday, August 28, 1859. George Bissell, a Dartmouth College educated attorney and amateur geologist hypothesized that the "rock-oil" that was abundantly available in western Pennsylvania would provide a better luminant than coal oil for lighting. Oil was initially called "rock-oil" because it seeped to the surface of the ground through fissures in rock abutments, leading people to believe that oil was associated with that type of terrain. Bissell formed the Pennsylvania Rock-Oil Company (which evolved into the Seneca Oil Company) and hired Edwin Drake, a former railroad conductor with some experience in mining coal, to hunt for large, marketable pools of oil for refining into kerosene.

Drake went to Titusville and began his first "dig." Because no one understood how to extract oil from the Earth, Drake went about it much the same way as a coal miner would. He began digging a oil mine. It was not until his "oil mine" collapsed in on him that he decided to drill a hole in the ground and let the oil pour out. It took Drake far more time to construct the world's first oil rig than it did to strike oil. Once the bit dug into the rocky terrain alongside the sludge-filled stream known as Oil Creek, it took less than a day to strike black gold.

Within a year the landscape around Oil Creek was speckled with oil rigs as hundreds of entrepreneurs decided to get in the lamp oil business. Standard Oil Company was formed during the infant days of the industry as Standard Works. Standard Oil was not formed to drill for oil. The company's founders, John D. Rockefeller and his partner Maraca Clark owned a grocery and produce distribution company—Clark & Rockefeller—in Cleveland, Ohio when the oil boom started. In 1862, Rockefeller and Clark invested $4,000 for a 50% stake in an oil refinery in Cleveland. Rockefeller later recalled thinking that $4,000 was an awful lot of money to invest in a fly-by-night scheme. Yet, in 8 years, Rockefeller, who would buy out Clark, would control roughly 80% of the oil distribution in the United States. By 1879 when Standard Oil tried to muscle into the Russian Baku oil fields and compete with the Rothschilds and the Nobel Brothers in 1885, Rockefeller controlled roughly 75% of all of the oil refining in the world.

Stealing the industry

How does one man—who was of modest means when he started in the oil refining business—steal the bulk of a global industry in less than two decades? How does that man—in his lifetime—become the richest man in the world?

By the end of the Civil War anyone with a thousand dollars in his pocket and the dream of getting rich could become an oil wildcatter—and many did. Striking oil was almost as commonplace as tying your shoes. New oil strikes impacted the price of oil so dramatically that by the time the refiners got the oil they purchased at the wellhead to their refinery, the wood slat barrels the oil was shipped in were, many times, worth more than the oil. The refiners formed a cartel in an attempt to regulate both the number of barrels of oil that would be sucked out of the ground and the amount of kerosene that would be distributed. The drillers, who did not understand the economic laws of supply and demand believed the refiners were trying to run them out of business by limiting their output, built their own refineries along Oil Creek until it was impossible to build more. With a glut of both crude oil and illuminants on the market, kerosene was selling for less than it cost to extract the crude oil from the ground.

Most of the driller-refiners went bankrupt since, while they had the ability to convert their oil to kerosene more quickly than the refiners in the urban centers, they were backlogged with unsellable inventories because they had too much kerosene and lacked the means to get their illuminants to market. In addition to bankrupting themselves, they almost bankrupted Standard Works.

In 1867 Rockefeller bought out Clark and a new partnership between Rockefeller, Samuel Andrews from Excelsoir, and Henry Flagler (who was allied with robber baron Jay Gould) was born. Rockefeller knew that to stabilize the oil industry two things had to happen. First, he had to control production—from the amount of oil sucked from the ground to the amount of kerosene manufactured, and he needed a more cost-efficient way to get the crude to the refinery—and block any excess oil from being refined in order to stabile the wholesale price of oil and all oil byproducts.

Flagler, using his railroad connections through the 19th century corporate raider, Jay Gould, negotiated deals with the railroad to transport crude to Standard Works in Cleveland. Gould formed a company, the Allegheny Transportation Company, in partnership with Standard Works. Allegheny would receive a kickback on every barrel of oil transported from the oil fields to the refinery—even the oil of its competitors. Gould had to guarantee the Lake Shore Railroad at least sixty carloads of oil every day. Averaged over the year, rail was faster and cheaper than barge to transport oil. Gould and Flagler had little trouble selling the small oil drillers on using Allegheny during the winter months even if the crude was delivered to competitors of Standard Works for refining. Convincing them to use Allegheny in the summer months was a horse-of-a-different-stripe since the drillers hated Rockefeller. They viewed him as the most evil man in the world. Ultimately, time and cost-saving prevailed. Slowly, America's oil industry slipped into the iron grip of a humble Baptist whose fellow Christians viewed their pious brother-in-Christ as the most benevolent man in the world.

Rockefeller, Flagler and Gould revolutionized oil transportation and also eliminated the risk of fire by contructing metal oil tank cars that quickly grew to a fleet of 1,800 units as Allegheny Transportation Company tightened it grip on the transit of anyone's crude oil to the refineries in the East or Mideast by rail. Transportation time to from the oil fields in Pennsylvania and West Virginia to New York dropped from 30 to 10 days. The amount of oil any train could safely carry doubled, trebled and then quadrupled. As successful as Standard Oil had become, the price of oil still fluctuated too much as more and more drillers sunk wells and even more entrepreneurs started refineries. During the Depression of 1873 (caused by the collapse of the international banking house of Jay Cooke & Company), hundreds of oil refineries found themselves in bankruptcy as banks called in notes the refiners could not pay off. Standing off in the wings, ready to buy those failed companies, was Standard Oil. As the oil industry found itself cash-starved and swimming in a sea of unsold crude oil and refined kerosene, Standard Oil found itself flush with capital. Its sales increasing dramatically as Rockefeller absorbed one competitor after another, buying the refineries and any oil fields those refiners may have owned.

During the turbulent six year depression,Standard Oil bought out roughly 2/3 of the refiners in the United States and gained a virtual stranglehold over the supply of kerosene in the United States. Refiners who resisted buyout offers from Standard Oil were simply driven out of business when Standard agents sold their customers kerosene at prices below what it cost to refine it. When their businesses collapsed, Rockefeller assumed them and provided the best managers and employees with jobs. Some of Standard Oil's best managers came from companies that were financially devastated by Rockefeller. Some of those men, like Joseph Newton Pew, would remain in control of the companies they founded. In many cases, the buyouts remained secret, since it benefited Standard Oil for its detractors to believe the new subsidiaries were still competitors of Standard Oil. The same is true today.

The vast wealth of the Pew family and the liberal Pew Charitable Trust came more from shares of Exxon-Mobil than it did from shares of SUNOCO. When Pew formed his two corporations in 1886, Rockefeller already had a monopoly over oil refining in the United States. In addition, Standard Oil owned almost 33% of the country's oil leases.By 1887 it had virtually dethroned The Bell Telephone Company as the largest corporation in America. (Bell Telephone would not officially become AT&T until 12:01:01 a.m., January 1, 1900.)

Standard Oil's clout on Capitol Hill was second to none. The second largest "charity" receiving contributions from Standard Oil were incumbent Senators and Congressmen. John D. Rockefeller, Sr. virtually owned Capitol Hill not so much because of the political contributions he made, but because of the powerful businessmen and bankers who feared him. With the spoken word, he could raise a question about the qualifications of a Congressman or Senator and launch—or end—a political career. Adding to his clout on the Hill was the father-in-law of his son, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Junior married Abby Aldrich, the daughter of Rhode Island's junior Senator, Nelson Aldrich (one of the eight men who wrote the legislation for the Federal Reserve at the Jekyll Island, Georgia home of JP Morgan). Aldrich was among a cabal of Senators and Representatives who wrote the 16th and 17th Amendments and helped pressure the States, against their best interests, to ratify both. Neither amendment was constitutionally ratified. Both are construed, by the courts, to be legally ratified.

Pew's organizations—Sun Oil Company and the People's Natural Gas Company—interested Rockefeller for two reasons. Pew's scientists had converted a waste byproduct of gasoline—natural gas—into a commodity whose value was equal to that of oil. Pew was also the first to find uses for the heavy waste oil sludge by creating lubricants for gears—a specialty that set Standard Oil apart from its peers. A Pew scientist, Eugene Houdry, mastered the catalytic cracking of gasoline, creating higher octane fuels. Standard Oil would earn billions over the years licensing Houdry's work which ultimately led to the catalytic converter as a standard fixture on cars when higher mileage was demanded by Congress.

In the final equation in the basic law of supply and demand, John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil learned early on that it really doesn't matter who drills the oil and pumps it from the ground. They are merely the "product source" since consumers don't buy crude oil. Consumers buy gasoline, fuel oil, jet fuel, kerosene, and a myriad of petroleum-based products that include every plastic item in your home or office. In the final analysis, while best guess estimates of the amount of oil remaining in the ground contribute to the cost of the gasoline you put in the tank of the family automobile, what impacts the market most—and immediately—is how much of that crude oil is being converted, at that moment, to gasoline. Think about that for a moment, because that is the hoax that allows the oil gougers to rip-off America when artificial shortages are created by the invisible money barons that control the oil industry.

Believe me when I say this—those invisible oil barons whose fingers are clenching your billfold or purse are not Arab sheiks. Those controlling the global price of crude oil and, by extension, the price of gasoline in the United States, are the Seven Sisters. The stepchildren of Standard Oil own half of all of the oil pumped from beneath the sand in the Mideast, half of most of the wells in Russia and, based on an IPO between Standard Oil and the Chinese government, half of all the oil under the South China Sea. Chevron has operated in China for over two decades. Half of the wells being drilled in China are jointly owned by Chevron and CNOOC. Citgo, which has a 50% stake in a large percentage of the wells in Venezuela, is half owned by the Seven Sisters as well. Look at the financial statements of any major oil company or refiner in the world and you will see the indelible fingerprints of one or more of the Seven Sisters on their Board of Directors.

The Great Global Gas Rip-off

Four days after Hurricane Katrina struck Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama and a day before Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco finally allowed federal agencies to set up relief efforts in her State (after demanding, in vain, that the President of the United States place all federal relief under her control) the price of gasoline began to spiral chaotically upward. Examples of price gouging at the dealer level were rampant along the escape route freeways from the Gulf Coast as early as August 26 when Louisiana and Mississippi's more affluent citizens—both white and black—headed for areas in the northern parts of the States, or one or two States away. Gasoline prices varied by State and density of population, with gasoline priced as high as $5.89 per gallon at one gas station in Atlanta, Georgia. (Georgia's Republican governor, Sonny Perdue, activated a Georgia Emergency Management Agency regulation that prevents price gouging, and forced the profiteers to drop their prices. The question that remains unanswered in the minds of a good many Americans is [a] why did hundreds of independent gas station operators in several southern States artificially inflate the price of the gasoline in their storage tanks when they had not yet suffered a price increase, and [b] when it came, what caused the retail price of gasoline to spike so quickly? And most important, whose to blame?

The Atlanta BP dealer who caused Perdue to take the extraordinary step of forcing a gas station owner to drop his prices admitted to the Atlanta Constitution that he raised his prices to keep the people trying to get out of Katrina's path from buying his gasoline in order to conserve his inventory until the prices spiked. In other words, most independent dealers must generate the money to pay for their next shipment of gasoline from the inventory in their holding tanks. Thus, when they see trends that will impact the price of gasoline in the immediate future, they will raise their retail prices in order to generate the cash they will need to pay the inflated price they will be charged for their next shipment of gasoline. You get to pay a much higher price for gasoline that cost the dealer much less because he doesn't have the money in the bank to cover the increased cost. You, in essense, become that gas station owner's bank—only you don't ever get paid back for fronting the money he needs to fills his storage tanks after the price incease.

Most independent gas station owners use "binocular calculus" to determine the price they will charge at the pump on any given day. What is binocular calculus? The station owner stands in front of his business with a pair of binoculars and looks down the street at the closest company-owned gas station to see what price is on his marquee.

That—give or take a penny—becomes his price. No science. Just a little good old fashioned guerilla marketing since the independent has no clear idea how much he will be charged for his next shipment of gasoline until he's handed the bill by the oil jobber driver. His problem is that, like most independents, he lives "hand-to-mouth." What he makes this week feeds his family next week.

Owning a gas station franchise is not like owning a MacDonalds or Wendy's franchise. The independent gas station owner is not guaranteed success. How much money he earns depends not on how much gas he pumps, but how many regular customers he has, how many mechanics work his bays—and how good they are. Or, if he's a convenience store gas station, what type of retail sales he generates from walk-in traffic that stops at his station to buy gas. So, you might say, oil gouging starts when the gas station reacts to the news that shortages are about to occur by raising his prices based on what the newscasters says the spot price for oil will be in the next quarter.

On the other hand, you can honestly argue that the tomorrow's price spikes are caused by oil futures buyers who speculate on the price of crude three months, six months, or a year from now. But who, exactly, are the "oil futures buyers?" Hedge fund buyers (futures buyers) are oil industry agents who are trying to hedge their client's bets on the availability and delivery of crude oil. In other words, they work for the oil refineries and/or the oil transport companies—you know, people like Exxon-Mobil. How does it work?

You probably believe from Hillary Clinton's brief but profitable sojourn in the futures market that you either make a killing or lose your butt in the futures market. That's what we've been led to believe. And, if you're an amateur, that's probably true. But hedging is an art. Let's assume your job is to make sure the ABC Oil Refinery has sufficient crude oil for refining. You buy a six month futures contract for a million barrels of oil at $70 per barrel. Six months later, the oil is selling for $75 per barrel. The hedge buyer still gets his oil at $70 per barrel. What happens if the price of oil drops and, instead of $70, the price of crude oil drops to $55 per barrel? The buyer loses $15 per barrel on his futures position, but that loss is offset by the lower price of acquiring oil on the open market. So, while it looks like the hedge buyer is losing his shirt, in reality, he's breaking even. And, to the oil industry, that's a win.

Who loses? The consumer who has paid a higher price for gasoline today because a hedge fund buyer bid up the price of oil in the next quarter or next year. It's the oil company's "shell game." What we end up with when the oil company's hedge fund managers bid up oil in the futures market are higher oil prices. But not in the three to six months where the buyer is theoretically hedging his bet—in three to six days. What is almost laughable is that the people who arbitrarily raise the price of oil—as a tool to slow the consumption of fossil fuels—are the same oil companies who fear that all carbon fuels are non-replenishable. When those reserves are gone in 300 to 500 years, the oil giants are out-of-business. That's why the oil giants are spending billions of dollars to create practical, economical alternate fuels that can replace gasoline as the fuel of choice on America's highways and byways and for energy needs as well as heating the world's homes, businesses and public institutions.

The oil company's strange ally.

When the Supreme Court broke up Standard Oil, the oil giant and the Seven Sisters appeared to have gotten the message—price-fixing and running the competition out of business simply would not be allowed. Market forces would prevail, and prices would be established by the basic economic laws of supply and demand. The Seven Sisters got the message because it was, after all, their message. When you control supply, you control demand.

Artificially choking off supply by crushing the competition, however, would likely be construed by the free enterprise watchdogs as a restraint of trade rather than a free exercise of entrepreneurialism by those with the financial muscle to overwhelm their competitors. The Seven Sisters had to find a way to entice the government to not only crush their independent competition in the oil and natural gas drilling and refining business, but to prevent new competitors from entering either the drilling or refining arenas in the United States. That was the only way the Seven Sisters would be able, with any degree of certainty, to continue to control the price of crude at the wellhead and the price of gasoline at the pumps.

The 1960s saw the birth of the radical environmental movement through the exploitation of a myth—global warming caused by a population explosion that threatened the existence of human life on Earth. Greenpeace. The Nature's Conservancy. The Sierra Club. World Wildlife Fund. Wilderness Society. Environmental Defense Fund. Earth Island Institute. All of the mainstream environmentalists had one thing in common—their source of funding. Where the radical, violent, fringe environmentaists received most of their funding from socialist organizations and foundations, the mainstream environmentalists received their initial funding from the world's oil giants and the foundations of the international industrialists and bankers.

The environmentalist movement was born in the mind of financier David Rockefeller in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The head of the Rockefeller family financial empire saw a world in which too many people consumed too much of the planet's natural resources too fast. Rockefeller was personally convinced that, by the year 2000—unless drastic steps were taken to curtail consumption—the world's oil, coal and lumber would be so depleted that a pandemic energy crisis would exist. Rockefeller, like Paul Ehrlich who wrote The Population Bomb in 1968, borrowed heavily from the writings of Thomas Robert Malthus the 18th century botonist who estimated that by the year 2000 the world would be diseased and dying, polluted by the waste of man. Malthus used 18th century science, crop yields, agricultural and construction techniques to calculate his timeline of when man would destroy his agricultural environment and starve to death. Ehrlich, who should have known better, used Malthus' flawed science in constructing his own timeline—the year 2000—for the death of the planet from carbon dioxide pollution, overpopulation, war and the destruction of the all the world's natural resources. The Rockefeller Foundation bought thousands of copies of The Population Bomb and distributed them to colleges and universities since Ehrlich's views dovetailed with those of David Rockefeller. Ehrlich argued in 1968 that that if America did not greatly expand government, increase regulations to control the movement of people, encourage abortion, restrict family choice, double or triple the price of gasoline to reduce consumption in order to protect the environment, by 2000 the world would be embroiled in constant war. Great famines of Biblical proportions, Ehrlich predicted, would decimate whole populations. Mankind would suffer unimaginable misery. In 1997 Ehrlich was interviewed by Timothy Maier, of the now out-of-print Insight on the News for an article that appeared on the newsstands on Jan. 5, 1998. In that interview, Ehrlich stood by his original predictions although it was obvious that, by 2000, they would be far from the mark. Ignoring his own lack of credibility, he said: "Unless we have a big increase in the death rate, all of the projections, even the most optimistic, show us adding another two-and-a-half billion people..we are already in a situation near disaster. And the concern of the entire scientific community is, of course, that unless we do a lot of things right, and start pretty quick, we're going to be in deep trouble." Pulling both statistics and consensus from thin air, Ehrlich had to be aware that population growth was not the primary concern of the entire scientific community—only that 13% receiving grants and jobs from the oil companies, their foundations and the liberal bureaucracies within the federal and State governments whose own life is fueled by the transnational industrialists who are currently striving to complete their plans to create a cohesive world government.

During the turbulent decade of the 60s the socialist liberals gained control of Congress. Sen. Joe McCarthy [R-WI] and Congressman B. Carroll Reece [R-TN] exposed the influence of the communists in the U.S. government, and uncovered a financial paper trail between the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trust and the Carnegie Trust through the Council on Foreign Relations to various communist front organizations in the United States.

As the liberal leadership in the US Senate struggled to undermine their own government during the Vietnam War years, several doomsday books were written in the early 60s that fanned the fears already sown by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations and the Carnegie Trust that the world was so overpopulated that within two decades half of the world would be starving and the other half would be killing the first half for whatever morsels of food they possessed. Carbon dioxide from carbon fuels was enveloping the world and creating an atrium effect that would cause the world to heat up and the polar caps to melt. Within a century or two, the harbingers of global warming insisted, the world would be virtually uninhabitable—like Venus. The only solution was to curb the world's population and drastically cut back on the use of fossil fuels in order to eliminate the carbon dioxide "film" that blanketed the planet and threatened the extinction of mankind.

There are a couple of flaws with the science behind global warming and with the scientists who advocate the theory. Population-induced global warming from chlorofluorocarbons—carbon dioxide from fossil fuels, or greehouse gases—is a myth. It does not exist and there is no science on Earth that has been able to prove that the exhaust from your car or the factory on the outskirts of town are causing the global temperature departure to rise (which actually has dropped -.5 degrees since 1950), artificially converting our planet into a giant atrium. Roughly 13% of the world's scientists believe global warming is a troublesome fact.

Eighty-seven percent of the scientific community in the world believe global warming is a myth. Interestingly, and almost without exception, the 13% that believes global warming—induced by carbon dioxide emissions from cars and factories—is a reality are [a] either government employees, [b] work either for the UN or one of the Foundation-funded Non-Government Organizations [NGO] associated with the UN, or [c] they work for the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, Pew Charitable Trust, Mellon Trust, Beinecke Foundation, Rockefeller Brother's Fund, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Morgan Guaranty Trust, the Carnegie Trust, or [d] some other foundation funded wholly or in part by one a handful of globalism-motivated foundations that are working hard to create world government with a merged, one-world economy. Scientists who do not have a vested interest in global warming do not believe that population-induced global warming is occurring in the world.

Even more strange is the fact that the same oil companies and foundations that insist that global warming is a fact, and that it is being induced by the exhaust of carbon fuels, are the same groups that have funded the advocacy of the environmental groups who attack the oil industry. Why would the oil industry fund a group to attack it?

Biting the hand

Is this a case of biting the hand that feeds them? No. The environmentalists are simply doing what they were created to do. It is a case of one paid advocate helping another achieve its objective to gain absolute control over the production and distribution of gasoline. Since the giant, transnational oil industry knew full well that the US government would be obligated to apply the Sherman Antitrust Act against the Seven Sisters if the transnational oil giants went after the small, independent oil refiners in the United States to force them out of business, big oil sicced their pit bulls on them—Earth Island Institute, Environmental Defense Fund, Greenpeace, Nature's Conservancy, Sierra Club, Wilderness Society, World Wildlife Fund and othersusing the obscure threat of global warming to demand that oppressive, extremely expensive regulations be imposed on the oil industry knowing that [a] the small independent refiners didn't have the financial means to meet the emissions standards imposed on them by the EPA and that they would be forced to shut down; and [b] that the industry giants would simply pass the cost of the new emissions standards directly on to the consumers in the former of higher gasoline and home heating oil costs.

The core strategy of Standard Oil has not changed since 1870. It has remained focused on its goal—the elimination of independent refinery competition in the world. As I have doggedly insisted over the past five years, Rockefeller learned early on that the only way to control the price of petroleum products at retail is to control how much oil is refined. As long as there were independent refiners who would not fully cooperate with Standard Oil and the Seven Sisters, supply would always meet or exceed demand. And the price of gasoline, due to competition from outside the sphere of the Seven Sisters and their Arab, Chinese and Russian partners, would remain below the mystical $2 per gallon benchmark rate. Once the ecoalarmist Al Gore EPA forced the smaller refiners out of business during the Clinton-Gore years, the free enterprise hurdle was removed and the Seven Sisters were allowed to use guerilla marketing monopoly tactics to drive up the price of crude oil without fear of regulatory reprisals from the government. After all, the Seven Sisters didn't force the independent refiners out of business—the Clinton Administration did that.

How do we force down the price of gasoline?

First, we have to understand that an international cabal controls the price of crude oil, and thus, the price of gasoline, jet fuel and home heating oil. The Seven Sisters would like us to believe that nothing more sinister than market forces—the law of supply and demand—determine the price of gasoline. The oil industry pundits are correct in part. Because the Seven Sisters, utilizing the effective advocacy of radical environmentalists who believe people are the worst curse our planet has been forced to endure, the stepchildren of Standard Oil have, through government regulation, eliminated their independent competition in the oil refining industry, They have manipulated the free enterprise system so that any catastrophic weather event creates a gasoline shortage that allows the Seven Sisters to raise the price of gasoline while appearing not to be responsible for the increases that occur—even when the world is swimming in an oil glut—which it was when Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast of the United States.

Six days before Hurricane Katrina, OPEC announced that it was considering solutions to the soaring prices of gasoline which they said, was completely unjustified. Sheik Ahmed Fahd Al Sabah, the Kuwaiti energy minister told the Gulf Daily News of Bahrain that "...[w]e are becoming increasingly concerned at the continuing high level of oil prices, which does not properly reflect the underlying fundamentals of the market. Oil resources are plentiful and supplies are plentiful. OPEC has been producing more than its agreed output by 1.5 million barrels per day in the three quarters of 2005." The oil minister said the world inventory of crude oil exceeded their 7-year average, and that the additional capacity OPEC agreed to pump early next year meant there would be enough oil in the market to meet all demands. Ahmed insisted there is no shortage, and that there was more than enough oil in the pipeline to meet demands throughout the winter and into 2006.

The Arabs appeared to be at a loss why, when they opened the spigot to free up enough oil to cover the demands of the world throughout the entire winter of 2006-07, that prices continued to soar. In their mind, supply adequately covered demand—and the global demand for oil had fallen. A slowdown in Chinese factories due to China's deliberate overproduction further reduced demand for oil in July and August. Reduced consumer demand worldwide caused by increased prices at the pumps cut gasoline consumption dramatically and should have caused the price of crude to drop below the $60 a barrel threshold. It did not.

It did not, simply because the price of gasoline has nothing to do with the volume of oil being pumped from the ground (unless there simply isn't enough oil being farmed and the storage tanks at the refineries around the world are empty).

But there is no shortage—there is an oil glut that is so severe that Saudi Arabia, which had increased oil production at the request of the Bush Administration, has cut back simply because the world's storage facilities are all full and there was no place to store the oil being pumped from the ground.

For the first time ever, a president—George W. Bush—addressed the reason why gasoline prices are skyrocketing; and for the first time ever, an American president honestly explained to the American people how to reverse the trend. Build oil refineriesquickly. In a press conference on Tuesday, Oct. 4, the president explained how to reduce the price of gasoline, home heating oil and jet fuel. Build refineries.

What Bush needs to do is revisit one of a dozen or so Executive Orders he issued on January 20, 2001(the day he assumed the presidency of the United States) and reissue that particular Executive Order under the emergency clause of the National Emergencies Act of 1976 [50 USC 1601], declaring the high price of gasoline is now a national emergency that threatens the entire economy of the United States. Under the powers provided to the President under this law, Bush then needs to declare that a national state of emergency, with respect to fuel exists, and waive the provisions of the Environmental Protection Acts that regulate greenhouse gas emissions over refineries, allowing all of the refineries closed by a Bill Clinton Executive Order after he and Vice President Al Gore signed the Kyoto Protocol an obligated the United States to its restrictions.

If you recall, Bush attempted to undo that Executive Order on Jan. 20, 2001. A Clinton Judge in the District of Columbia ruled that, on this one occasion, an incoming president could not repeal an Executive Order issued by an outgoing president because, the judge said, the incoming president was "politically motivated," and repealing the EO could have a detrimental impact on the environment. Since the rising cost of gasoline has reach crisis proportions, not remedying the problem quickly will have a devastating impact on the US economy. Bush not only needs to allow the independent refiners who were forced out of business in the Clinton years to reopen, he needs to force the Seven Sisters to funnel crude to those refineries to generate a sufficient inventory of gasoline to reverse the trend of the past five years.

Bush also needs to impose a surtax on the oil industry that cannot be passed on to the consumers. The surtax should not only seize any profits any oil company operating in the United States would gain over a mandated benchmark price—say $45 per barrel. Under that Executive Order, the Justice Department would also be obligated to impose a price gouging "fine" equal to the "obscene profit" tax imposed for any oil sold over the benchmark price. Not only would the Seven Sisters and the oil cabal not profit from price gouging due to artificially-generated shortages caused by advocacy financed by them, they would have a net loss for every barrel of oil or gallon of gasoline sold at inflated prices. Congress would then be called upon to make the Executive Order permanent by writing into law a ceiling on the price of oil. Just as America's law on the global price of gold pegged at $32 per ounce, an American ceiling on oil will bring the global price of oil to that benchmark as well. The oil barons can scream restraint of free trade all they want because, in reality, what Bush would be doing is restoring oil to the free trade arena by allowing the independent entrepreneurs back into the playing field.

Extreme measures are needed. They are needed now. If Congress and the independent drillers and refiners who listened to Bush's speech began applying for the needed permits to build new refineries in the United States based on the current EPA regulations that closed every independent refinery in the United States over the past two decades, it would take upwards of ten years to get them into operation. In ten years, gasoline will be selling for $7.50 to $10.00 per gallon, and most cars will be burning soybean gasoline at the same price. And Mexican illegals in the United States will be spending most of their time trying to cross the heavily guarded borders in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas to get back into Mexico to find work since all of the jobs in American will have vanished over the southern horizon with the $5 per gallon gasoline.

 

 

 

Just Say No
Copyright © 2009 Jon Christian Ryter.
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