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The World Plutocracy
The Oil Rulers

"The trouble with this country is
that you can't win an election
without the oil bloc,
and you can't govern with it"

Franklin D. Roosevelt
I Am Your Ruler

I own the politicians
I make people stupid so I can rule easily
I take away your jobs
I take my factories where wages are lowest
I destroy the environment
I take your taxes when my investments fail
My politicians allow unlimited immigration to give me cheap labor
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Plutocracy is that form of government in which, instead of the people being represented by their elected officials, those with wealth "buy" the officials. Those officials then create laws and policies which produce obscene profits for the wealthy owners of corporations.

Beginning in the nineteenth century with the Rockefeller monopoly, persons of wealth and political power decided that the energy of choice for the world would be oil (not coal)--just as the drugs of choice would be alcohol and tobacco. They set out to control the world's oil reserves.

British Petroleum (earlier Anglo-Persian and then Anglo-Iranian Oil Company) was started by William Knox D'Arcy in 1901 when he bought a concession from the Grand Vizier in Teheran for 480,000 square miles (nearly twice the size of Texas) in exchange for twenty thousand pounds in cash, twenty thousand one pound shares, and sixteen percent of the net profits. After three years of drilling and finding no oil, D'Arcy convinced the Burmah Oil Company to put up the extra capital needed to keep D'Arcy's venture afloat. After another two years of drilling they finally struck oil and Burmah Oil and D'Arcy formed the new Anglo-Persian Oil Company. In 1914, three months before the start of World War I, the British government, through the insistence of Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, bought 51 percent of Anglo-Persian for two million pounds, stipulating that the company must always remain an independent British concern and that every director must be a British subject. The British navy had converted to oil (from coal) in 1910 and during World War I, Britain needed more oil than the Anglo-Persian Company could supply. The remainder was purchased from Royal Dutch Shell.

Oil Wars

In the early part of the twentieth century, there was fierce rivalry between the three largest oil companies: Shell, Exxon, and British Petroleum.

  • Henri Deterding, head of Shell, bought: 
    • oilfields in Egypt (In 1908)
    • the Russsian Ural-Caspian oilfields (1910)
    • Mexican oilfields belonging to Lord Cowdray (Weetman Pearson)
    • Venezualan oilfields (which still produce a sixth of Shell's supplies)
    • American oilfields 
  • Walter Teagle, head of Exxon
      •  
    • secretly bought a prosperous Texas oil company misleadingly named Humble (1919)
    • secretly bought out the Nobels' Russian oil interests for $11.5 million (1920)--though the new communist regime seized the oilfields and paid Exxon nothing 
  • British Petroleum
      •  
    • BP controlled not only Iran (Anglo-Persian Oil Company) but a quarter of the oil from the Iraq Petroleum Company. The Iraq Petroleum Company (earlier called the Turkish Petroleum Company) was formed following the first world war, composed of British Petroleum (BP), Exxon, Gulf, Texaco, Mobil, and Calouste Gulbenkian, an Armenian entrepreneur.
    • In 1928, Teagle (Exxon), Deterding (Shell), and Sir John Cadman (BP) met in Achnacarry Castle in Scotland. They agreed on a price-fixing scheme that would stop the cutthroat competition that had been harmful to all of them. These three oil rulers controlled the pricing and supply of oil worldwide.
 However, a huge new oilfield first drilled in Kilgore, Texas, released a gush of oil, resulting in the price of crude falling to ten cents a barrel. H.L. Hunt bought out the original Kilgore wildcat driller, "Dad Joiner." Hunt became a billionaire, the richest of all the Texans. But the problem of oversupply was so devastatinig that the governors of Texas and Oklahoma called in the national guard and closed down oilfields, enforcing a system of rationing by which the demand in a particualr month was shared among oil producers by a state body called the Texas Railroad Commission. 
In 1926 Exxon signed an agreement with the German chemical combine, I.G. Farben, for an exchange of patents and research: Farben was to stay out of the oil business and Exxon would stay out of the chemical business. The agreement gave Nazi Germany hundred-octane avation fuel and synthetic rubber. Exxon held back the research in synthetic rubber in the U.S. In 1941 the Justice Department bought two antitrust suits against Exxon: for conspiring to control oil transportation through pipelines and for making restrictive agreements with I.G. Farben. Exxon was forced to pay a fine of $50,000.
 The U.S. was now involved in the second World War and Japan had just seized the Malayan rubber plantations, from which America had earlier derived its supply of rubber. Senator Harry Truman claimed that Exxon's failure to pursue synthetic rubber research in the U.S., while developing it in collaboration with the Germans, constituted treason.

 Texaco, under the direction of its swashbuckling president, Torkild Rieber, provided six million dollars worth of oil to Franco, the Spanish dictator. Rieber also made contact through Spain with leading Nazis and agreed to supply oil from Colombia to Germany. Texaco continued to supply oil to Nazi Germany even after the outbreak of the World War II in 1939, receiving as payment three Hamburg tankers. Rieber sealed the deal with Goering in Berlin. At Goering's insistence, Rieber put forward a peace plan to Franklin D. Roosevelt which would ensure Britain's surrender. Roosevelt told Rieber to get out of his dealings with Nazi Germany. Rieber ignored Roosevelt and financed the propaganda mission of Dr. Gerhardt Wesrick, a German lawyer, to dissuade American businessmen from suplying Britain with arms. The head of British Intelligence in New York, the Canadian millionaire William Stephenson, learned of the Westrick fiasco and broke the story to the New York Herald Tribune. Westrick was forced to return to Germany on a Japanese ship. Rieber was discredited and Texaco shares plummeted.
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"An honest and scupulous man in the oil business is so rare as to rank as a museum piece"
Harold Ickes, U.S. Petroleum Administrator for War during World War II
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Mexican oil was essentially controlled by a Britisher, Weetman Pearson, later to be titled Lord Cowdray. He began as early as 1901 to buy concessions in Mexico and by 1918 he was one of the richest men in the world, the nearest British equivalent to the American Rockefeller. His fortune laid the foundation for Lazards Bank, the Financial Times, The Economist, Longmans and Penguin Books. In 1919, Cowdray sold out the majority of his company to Deterding of Shell. In 1938, Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas nationalized the seventeen foreign-owned oil companies and a monument to the nationalized company, PEMEX, was erected in Mexico City, at which diplomats were required to place wreaths. The American, Dutch, and British oil companies boycotted the nationalized Mexican oil interestes and the incompetently-run PEMEX was eventually forced to pay $130 million in compensation for seizing the companies. During the second world war, the big oil companies drained off much of Mexico's oil reserves, then switched their attention to Venzuela where they were in league with Gomez, the dictator.
Meanwhile in the Middle-East
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