The U.S Oil Imperialism: Americans would support the truth

The New U.S. (and

-British) Oil Imperialism

The Spoils of the Iraq War

The war in Iraq, as has been suggested, is all about oil and most

literate Americans already understand this. It would be far better if

the administration admitted that it is about oil. Americans would

support the truth..They don't care how, or where, we get our oil.

The World Plutocracy

Part I:

Oil Rulers

"The trouble with this country is that you can't win an election

without the oil bloc, and you can't govern with it."

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Plutocracy is that form of government in which, instead of the people

being represented by their elected officials, those with wealth "buy"

the officials. Those officials then create laws and policies which

produce obscene profits for the wealthy owners of corporations.

Beginning in the nineteenth century with the Rockefeller monopoly,

persons of wealth and political power decided that the energy of

choice for the world would be oil (not coal)--just as the drugs of

choice would be alcohol and tobacco. They set out to control the

world's oil reserves.

British Petroleum (earlier Anglo-Persian and then Anglo-Iranian Oil

Company) was started by William Knox D'Arcy in 1901 when he bought a

concession from the Grand Vizier in Teheran for 480,000 square miles

(nearly twice the size of Texas) in exchange for twenty thousand

pounds in cash, twenty thousand one pound shares, and sixteen percent

of the net profits. After three years of drilling and finding no oil,

D'Arcy convinced the Burmah Oil Company to put up the extra capital

needed to keep D'Arcy's venture afloat. After another two years of

drilling they finally struck oil and Burmah Oil and D'Arcy formed the

new Anglo-Persian Oil Company. In 1914, three months before the start

of World War I, the British government, through the insistence of

Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, bought 51 percent of

Anglo-Persian for two million pounds, stipulating that the company

must always remain an independent British concern and that every

director must be a British subject. The British navy had converted to

oil (from coal) in 1910 and during World War I, Britain needed more

oil than the Anglo-Persian Company could supply. The remainder was

purchased from Royal Dutch Shell.

Oil Wars

In the early part of the twentieth century, there was fierce rivalry

between the three largest oil companies: Shell, Exxon, and British

Petroleum.

Henri Deterding, head of Shell, bought:

o oilfields in Egypt (In 1908)

o the Russsian Ural-Caspian oilfields (1910)

o Mexican oilfields belonging to Lord Cowdray (Weetman Pearson)

o Venezualan oilfields (which still produce a sixth of Shell's

supplies)

o American oilfields

Walter Teagle, head of Exxon

o secretly bought a prosperous Texas oil company misleadingly named

Humble (1919)

o secretly bought out the Nobels' Russian oil interests for $11.5

million (1920)--though the new communist regime seized the oilfields

and paid Exxon nothing

British Petroleum

o BP controlled not only Iran (Anglo-Persian Oil Company) but a

quarter of the oil from the Iraq Petroleum Company. The Iraq Petroleum

Company (earlier called the Turkish Petroleum Company) was formed

following the first world war, composed of British Petroleum (BP),

Exxon, Gulf, Texaco, Mobil, and Calouste Gulbenkian, an Armenian

entrepreneur.

In 1928, Teagle (Exxon), Deterding (Shell), and Sir John Cadman (BP)

met in Achnacarry Castle in Scotland. They agreed on a price-fixing

scheme that would stop the cutthroat competition that had been harmful

to all of them. These three oil rulers controlled the pricing and

supply of oil worldwide.

However, a huge new oilfield first drilled in Kilgore, Texas, released

a gush of oil, resulting in the price of crude falling to ten cents a

barrel. H.L. Hunt bought out the original Kilgore wildcat driller,

"Dad Joiner." Hunt became a billionaire, the richest of all the

Texans. But the problem of oversupply was so devastatinig that the

governors of Texas and Oklahoma called in the national guard and

closed down oilfields, enforcing a system of rationing by which the

demand in a particualr month was shared among oil producers by a state

body called the Texas Railroad Commission.

In 1926 Exxon signed an agreement with the German chemical combine,

I.G. Farben, for an exchange of patents and research: Farben was to

stay out of the oil business and Exxon would stay out of the chemical

business. The agreement gave Nazi Germany hundred-octane avation fuel

and synthetic rubber. Exxon held back the research in synthetic rubber

in the U.S. In 1941 the Justice Department bought two antitrust suits

against Exxon: for conspiring to control oil transportation through

pipelines and for making restrictive agreements with I.G. Farben.

Exxon was forced to pay a fine of $50,000.

The U.S. was now involved in the second World War and Japan had just

seized the Malayan rubber plantations, from which America had earlier

derived its supply of rubber. Senator Harry Truman claimed that

Exxon's failure to pursue synthetic rubber research in the U.S., while

developing it in collaboration with the Germans, constituted treason.

Texaco, under the direction of its swashbuckling president, Torkild

Rieber, provided six million dollars worth of oil to Franco, the

Spanish dictator. Rieber also made contact through Spain with leading

Nazis and agreed to supply oil from Colombia to Germany. Texaco

continued to supply oil to Nazi Germany even after the outbreak of the

World War II in 1939, receiving as payment three Hamburg tankers.

Rieber sealed the deal with Goering in Berlin. At Goering's

insistence, Rieber put forward a peace plan to Franklin D. Roosevelt

which would ensure Britain's surrender. Roosevelt told Rieber to get

out of his dealings with Nazi Germany. Rieber ignored Roosevelt and

financed the propaganda mission of Dr. Gerhardt Wesrick, a German

lawyer, to dissuade American businessmen from suplying Britain with

arms. The head of British Intelligence in New York, the Canadian

millionaire William Stephenson, learned of the Westrick fiasco and

broke the story to the New York Herald Tribune. Westrick was forced to

return to Germany on a Japanese ship. Rieber was discredited and

Texaco shares plummeted.

"An honest and scupulous man in the oil business is so rare as to rank

as a museum piece."

Harold Ickes, U.S. Petroleum Administrator for War during World War II

Mexican oil was essentially controlled by a Britisher, Weetman

Pearson, later to be titled Lord Cowdray. He began as early as 1901 to

buy concessions in Mexico and by 1918 he was one of the richest men in

the world, the nearest British equivalent to the American Rockefeller.

His fortune laid the foundation for Lazards Bank, the Financial Times,

The Economist, Longmans and Penguin Books. In 1919, Cowdray sold out

the majority of his company to Deterding of Shell. In 1938, Mexican

President Lazaro Cardenas nationalized the seventeen foreign-owned oil

companies and a monument to the nationalized company, PEMEX, was

erected in Mexico City, at which diplomats were required to place

wreaths. The American, Dutch, and British oil companies boycotted the

nationalized Mexican oil interests and the incompetently-run PEMEX was

eventually forced to pay $130 million in compensation for seizing the

companies. During the second world war, the big oil companies drained

off much of Mexico's oil reserves, then switched their attention to

Venzuela where they were in league with Gomez, the dictator.

Meanwhile, in the Middle-East

In 1926, King Ibn Saud, the Muslim desert warrior, had conquered his

rivals in Mecca and the Hejaz and named the whole territory, from the

Persian Gulf to the Red Sea, Saudi Arabia, the only country to be

named after its ruling family. One of King Saud's principal advisors

was Harry St. John Philby, the Arabist who had quit the British

Colonial Service out of disaffection. Philby had become a Muslim and

was close to Saud. King Saud needed money to finance his enterprises

and Philby suggested that he exploit his land's oil resources. Philby

assisted Socal in getting the concession in 1933. King Saud received

an immediate loan of thirty thousand pounds, with another twenty

thousand pounds eighteen months later, and an annual rent of five

thousand pounds, all in gold. Socal paid Philby a salary of one

thousand pounds a year.

Socal, short of capital and market outlets, sold half of its Saudi and

Bahrain concession to Texaco's Cap Rieber. The joint venture was

called Aramco. In May, 1939, King Saud turned the valve on the

pipeline and the oil began to flow. Saud was so delighted with the

money and gifts he received from Socal and Texaco that he increased

the size of the concession to 444,000 square miles, a plot the size of

Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and New Mexico combined.

Kuwait, one of many small independent sheikhdoms which had cut into

the land mass of Saudi Arabia, had also discovered oil and the

concession was purchased by Gulf in 1927 for $50,000. In 1934 Gulf and

BP signed an agreement with the Kuwaiti sheikh in a joint venture and

huge reserves were discovered in 1938.

During World War II, Britain advanced about twenty million dollars to

King Saud to bribe him to renege on the Socal/Texaco concession and go

with BP. Socal and Texaco appealed to Washington and Roosevelt sent

lend-lease money to Saudi Arabia. Roosevelt and his advisors decided

that the United States should have a controlling interest in Aramco,

to protect the nation's oil interests. In 1943, Roosevelt authorized

the formation of a new corporation to acquire a hundred percent of

Aramco.

Harold Ickes, petroleum administrator for War and Secretary of the

Interior, was president of the new corporation, the secretaries of

State, War, and the Navy among the directors and Abe Fortas as

secretary. Aramco would not immediately agree to sell its concession

to the new federal corporation, so Ickes said the corporation would

build a thousand-mile pipeline to carry Saudi Arabian oil to the

Mediterranean. In return, Aramco would guarantee twenty percent of

their oilfields as a naval reserve which would be available to the

navy at a cut rate. In the end, after much political bickering in the

U.S. and internationally, Texaco and Socal built the pipeline

themselves, creating the Trans-Arabian Pipeline Company (Tapline). It

was not until 1949 that Syria and Lebanon agreed to let the pipeline

be built at a cost of $200 million. Over the years, the pipeline was a

target for guerrillas, a focus for boycotts, and a bargaining chip for

Syria against America. In 1975 it was shut down.

In 1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt promised King Saud that the United

States would not change its policy regarding Palestine--and a Jewish

state --without consulting the Arabs. However, Harry Truman became

U.S. President two months later and gave full support to the

establishment of the new state of Israel. Socal and Texaco worried

about the political climate in Saudi Arabia. They decided to bring two

other American oil companies into Aramco, Exxon (30%) and Mobil (10%).

King Saud continued to demand more money and finally in 1950 the U.S.

State Department and Aramco agreed on a scheme whereby the money

Aramco gave King Saud would be deducted from the company's tax bill,

thus depriving the U.S. Treasury of $50 million or more in taxes each

year. Under the U.S. tax laws establishing double taxation, the oil

companies would not be taxed inside the United States. All the major

oil companies adopted the same tax dodge so that by 1973 the five

largest companies were making two-thirds of their profits abroad and

paying no U.S. taxes on those earnings. This arrangement allowed oil

companies to pay lower U.S. taxes than any group of industries. The

United States had essentially turned into a country operated for the

profit of the oil rulers.

Reza Shah seized power in Iran in 1921and soon took on the trappings

of the Persian Peacock Throne. In 1941, when Hitler invaded Russia,

the Shah refused to expel his Nazi allies, so the British and Russian

armies invaded Iran to ensure oil and supply routes. The Shah was

exiled to South Africa, where he died. During the war, Britain and

Russia ruled, but at the end of World War II, the old Shah's twenty-

one year old son was placed in power. Iran, like most oil-producing

countries, resented the power its foreign-owned oil company wielded

over it. A shrewd older politician, Dr. Mossadeq, was appointed

chairman of a committee on Iranian oil policy. By 1951, Mossadeq was

calling for nationalization and when he was elected prime minister by

the Iranian parliament, Iran immediately seized BP's oilfields.

Iran was placed under international boycott by BP. When a Panamanian

ship, the Rose Mary, took on oil from Abadan, RAF planes forced it

into Aden harbor and impounded its cargo. American oil companies

joined the BP boycott of Iran. However, President Truman and the

Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, were appalled by the naked

imperialism of Britain and when Mossadeq came to America to plead his

case to the UN Security Council, Acheson befriended him.

However, antitrust fever had again overtaken the U.S. In 1952, the

Senate Select Committee on Small Business released a report aptly

titled "The International Petroleum Cartel." The report showed that

the seven largest oil companies, nicknamed the Seven Sisters,

controlled the majority of the oil-producing areas outside the United

States, all foreign refineries, divided the world markets between

them, shared pipelines and tankers between themselves, and fixed oil

prices worldwide. But Eisenhower became President and John Foster

Dulles was appointed Secretary of State, with the result that the oil

cartel was forgotten and the new foreign policy mythology became anti-

communism.

In 1953, the CIA, with British support, began a subversive action

against Mossadeq. Mossadeq had taken control over the Iranian army.

The Shah tried to oust him, failed, and was forced to flee the

country. The CIA coup, led by the CIA's Kermit Roosevelt, spending

about $700,000, forced Mossadeq out of office and the Shah returned to

Teheran triumphant. British and American oil companies formed an

international consortium to buy and develop Iranian oil. BP received

40% of the shares of the consortium, the five American sisters each

got 8%, Shell received 14%, and CFP (Compaignie Francaise de Petrole)

6 percent. The oil cartel members congratulated themselves that they

had shown the world that no puny nation, such as Iran or Mexico, could

seize their assets and long flourish.

OPEC

In 1961 the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) was

established with members: Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and

Venezuela. Since that beginning, the following countries have attained

membership: Qatar (1961), Indonesia and Libya (1962), Abu Dhabi

(1967), United Arab Emirates (1974), Algeria (1969), Nigeria (1971),

Ecuador (1973), and Gabon (1975). Their headquarters, originally

located in Geneva, moved to Vienna in 1965. Policy is determined by

delegates from members countries, which meet at least twice a year.

>From the beginning of the oil energy monopoly there have been other

sources of energy that are more abundant, more environment-friendly,

and vastly cheaper. Steam-driven vehicles proved efficient but they

were driven out by gasoline-driven vehicles. Since railway engines

require less fuel than automobiles and trucks, they have been allowed

to fall into disrepair, the decrepit U.S. railway infrastructure now

producing frequent calamities.

World oil prices are currently high because OPEC and the American and

British oil companies manipulate the prices to gain the highest

profits possible. It actually costs only about $1 per barrel to pump

oil from the ground, but the present price is $26.41 per barrel. If

the market demand for oil products were allowed to operate

independently, gas prices at the pump could drop by 50 percent at

least.

In 1973, OPEC raised oil prices by 70 percent as a political warfare

tactic aimed at western nations supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur

War of October, 1973. That same year, in December, prices were hiked

another 130 percent and a temporary embargo was placed on oil

shipments to the United States and The Netherlands.

By the early 1980s, however, OPEC's influence began to wane as Western

oil corporations discovered new sources of oil and began to use

political and subversive pressure to force OPEC to cut back production

to keep prices artificially high. OPEC's power has been decimated by

internal conflicts and the Iran-Iraq war that broke out in 1980.

Within the last several months, the U.S. has again warned OPEC about

its raising prices by threatening to open up our national strategic

oil reserves. The U.S. and British oil corporations insist on being

the only ones to manipulate the price of oil.

The Gulf War was perpetrated by British and U.S. rulers to:

Warn Japan and the European countries (especially Germany) that the

U.S. controls the world's oil supply (by armed force if necessary)

Control Iraq's oil production through the embargo resulting from the

war

Conquer Iraq since it threatens Israel's military hegemony in the

Middle-East

Even though Iraq is under an embargo at present, it's estimated that

Iraq ships approximately 100,000 barrels of illicit oil (in excess of

the U.N.-approved export quota) per day. At the end of the U.S.

rulers' war against Serbia in Bosnia and Kosovo, an embargo was

slapped on Serbia. However, recently Serbia has been receiving

blackmarket oil from Russia. That's why U.S. Navy SEALs recently

boarded a Russian ship in the Gulf of Oman: to warn the Russians not

to continue selling oil to Serbia.

The world oil cartel continues to fix gasoline prices worldwide. As

this article is being written, for example, prices in California have

skyrocketed. During the past year, world crude oil prices have

increased by approximately 340%. The April 1999 decision by OPEC to

cut production quotas contributes to the hyperinflation of oil prices,

but it's only a part of the problem. OPEC now produces about 40% of

the world's oil supply.

The real cause of the current rise in price for oil is that

speculators are now moving into what are called hard commodities:

energy, base metals, and food. On March 8, 2000, Iranian Oil Minister,

Bijan Namdar Zanganeh, pointed out in a speech on Iran State TV that

speculation, rather than physical shortages in crude oil, lay behind

the current surge in oil prices.

This series deals with plutocracy, the rule of a nation by those with

wealth. Plutocrats deal in all sectors of the economy, oil as well as

all others. Currently these plutocratic speculators are making

billions of dollars through their Wall Street scam, primarily in the

technology stocks which are being artificially inflated beyond any

relation to the real value of the companies offering the stocks.

For example, in February, 2000, Bloomberg News reported that the stock

of the $23 million Internet company NetJ.com, which went public in

November, 1999, had doubled in share price to nearly $4. This occurred

despite the fact that the company plainly disclosed in documents

submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission that it not only

had no profits but no revenues and in fact that it did no business of

any kind. The documents indicated that NetJ.com might begin doing

business soon, but perhaps not. If it did begin doing business, it had

no specific idea what kind of work it would do.

Along with their hyperinflationary speculation in the markets, oil

corporations continue to buy politicians, resulting in Oil Rulers

dominating every nation in the world.

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http://www.hermes-press.com/oilupdate.htm

Big Oil Rulers

Part Two

The Big Oil cartel connected with the Bush family is gambling billions

in the Caucasus--not their own money, of course, but taxpayer

subsidies--to strike it rich in the Caspian oil fields. These oil

companies and their subsidiaries make money by creating new regional

wars to which American troops are sent, with transportation and

weaponry systems supplied by the same complex of corporations.

Naturally, these ventures will be paid for by American taxpayers, with

our money and the lives of our sons and daughters, while obscene

profits will be realized by the oil rulers.

Now that Dubya got into office through a coup d'etat, having raised

the largest campaign war chest in American history from these very

same oil and defense industry interests, the oil cartel will have an

even tighter death grip on the United States. These corporations

consider the Bush campaign an investment, looking to a huge payoff

from the profits of the biggest oil bonanza in history. Now that Bush

has made it to the White House, a new Cold War era is almost

guaranteed.

As George Bush Sr.'s hitman for the Gulf War, Dick Cheney bullied and

coerced the middle-eastern countries into supporting Bush's War for

Oil. As the senior Bush's Secretary of Defense, Cheney high-pressured

Saudi Arabian officials in August 1990 after Iraq had invaded Kuwait.

The Saudi monarchy, which maintains its power with the aid of U.S.

weaponry, agreed to cooperate after Cheney claimed Iraq planned to

attack the country's border.

Cheney led similar missions to Egypt, Morocco and other Middle Eastern

and North African countries to coerce military cooperation. Without

this arm-twisting, the U.S. military would have faced much stiffer

opposition to its war on Iraq.

The 1991 Gulf War devastated Iraq's people and infrastructure, causing

enormous social and personal difficulties.

However, Bush Sr., Cheney and the Republicans didn't act alone in

these war crimes. Democrats in both the Senate and the House gave the

war their blessing on January 12, 1991.

The Clinton-Gore administration carried out aerial bombardments on

Iraq every week and the Democrats were heavily involved in the deadly

sanctions against Iraq. On Aug. 2, 1990--before a single bomb was

dropped or artillery shell fired at Iraq--"liberal Democratic" U.S.

Senators George Mitchell, Edward Kennedy and Joseph Biden stood next

to right wingers Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms to sponsor a

resolution urging "a full economic blockade against Iraq."

Democrats and Republicans alike continue to support this genocidal

policy. Sanctions have taken a terrible toll on the Iraqi people. At

least 1.5 million people, mostly children under 5, have died as a

result of the U.S.-imposed United Nations sanctions. Five thousand

more perish each month.

Cheney later became CEO of the Dallas-based Halliburton Company, which

over a five year period paid him a whopping $65 million in salary and

stock options. Halliburton gave Cheney a $20 million farewell package

when he became the Republican Vice Presidential nominee.

Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, continues to enrich

itself from the decision made by Cheney at the Pentagon to privatize

the military's logistical support facilities. Brown and Root were

given lucrative Pentagon contracts in Kuwait and throughout the world

exceeding $3.8 billion a year. Joe Lopez, Cheney's aide in the Defense

Department, is now chief operating officer of Brown and Root.

Of the two candidates, Dubya is decidedly the choice of Big Oil.

Gore's connection to Big Oil and Big Money is no less notorious than

Dubya's. His father, longtime Tennessee Senator Al Gore, Sr.,

maintained close relations with the infamous international wheeler-

dealer and Kremlin favorite, Dr. Armand Hammer. In his book Dossier,

Edward Jay Epstein maintained that Gore senior was Hammer's principal

contact among the Democrats in the House. In 1950, Hammer made

Congressman Gore a partner in a cattle-breeding business, from which

Gore made a substantial profit. Hammer was Gore Sr.'s guest at five

presidential inaugurations, including that of John F. Kennedy. Senator

Al Gore, Jr. invited Hammer to be his guest at Ronald Reagan's

inauguration.

When Gore Sr. was defeated for reelection to the Senate in 1970, after

32 years in Congress, Hammer appointed Gore president of Island Creek

Coal, the nation's third largest coal producer and made Gore a vice

president of Occidental Petroleum with a hefty $500,000 annual salary.

Gore Sr. was a very effective lackey:

arranging for President Kennedy to give Hammer his official approval

for Hammer to travel to the Soviet Union where he met Soviet leader,

Nikita Krushchev

defending Hammer, on the floor of the Senate, against accusations of

attempted bribery

writing a letter of introduction to the American ambassador in

Libya, asking the ambassador to arrange a meeting between Hammer and

King Idris I of Libya

accompanying Hammer to Libya when Hammer's Libyan oil pipeline

opened operations.

Al Jr.'s Russian Connection

Junior struck up backroom alliances with Russian financial gangsters

such as Viktor Chernomyrdin, who turned Russia's huge energy reserves

into corrupt personal fiefdoms after the collapse of the Soviet

regime. With Gore's support, Chernomyrdin became prime minister of the

Russian Federation.

Chernomyrdin and his cohorts--backed by the Russian Mafia--stole

Russia's natural resources such as oil, gold, timber and daimonds,

hawking them on the black market in Russia and abroad. The proceeds

were stashed in numbered bank accounts all over Western europe.

An equal opportunity scoundrel, Al Jr. became the "Solicitor General"

for the 1996 Democratic campaign, dunning Big Money contributors at

home and abroad, especially China. Al barely escaped indictment with

some fancy verbal footwork: "I didn't do anything wrong and I won't do

it again."

The Clinton/Gore administration has now decided to tap into the

Strategic Petroleum Reserve. This is a key strategy in the Gore

campaign:

Bush is tied into foreign oil and any use of the U.S. Strategic

Petroleum Reserve lowers the price of foreign oil

U.S. voters are fed up with high gasoline prices and Gore may be

seen as the good guy who lowered those prices

Energy Secretary Bill Richardson maintained that "this is not

political," as he announced the release of 30 million barrels of oil

from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve over the next 30 days. It was no

accident that Gore was campaigning in Vanport, PA when Richardson made

the announcement. Vanport is one of many U.S. communities where the

price of heating oil has doubled within a year. When a member of the

audience said that since Bush was a "big oilman" he "isn't going to do

too much" about rising oil prices, Gore merely said, "No comment."

---------------------

The New U.S.-British

Oil Imperialism

By

Norman D. Livergood

The U.S. invasion of Iraq to loot its oil and politically restructure

the Middle East, is part of a policy of military imperialism that the

American and British ruling circles have been engaged in for several

centuries. The American revolution was fought to bring the United

States under new, non-British rulers, with the new regime sold to the

public as a democracy. Beginning in the twentieth century, these

American ruling elites have revolved around the Rockefeller, Brown,

Harriman, and Morgan family dynasties. The Bush family, beginning with

Prescott Bush, have served as satraps of the Rockefeller, Brown, and

Harriman interests.

As we've seen, in earlier articles on these imperialistic rulers (Part

1, Part 2), the British and American ruling cabal decided that the

energy of choice for the world would be oil and natural gas (not

coal)--just as the drugs of choice would be alcohol and tobacco.

To overcome the problem of his oil holdings being broken apart by the

U.S. government in 1911, John Rockefeller set out to control the

world's energy reserves. World War I was the strategy of the world oil

cartel (Standard, Shell, British Petroleum) to take over the colonies

of France, Holland, Spain and Portugal. The engines of war now ran on

petroleum-based products, so ownership of oil could determine who won

or lost a war--therefore who would rule the world. Oil, instead of

gold, became the token of power.

By 1919, the Oil Empire, not based on countries or nations, but on

private corporations, ruled the world.

The Big Three oil cartel, which controlled oil in the Persian Gulf and

southeast Asia areas, wanted to gain control over the vast oil

reserves in the southern part of the Soviet Union. They financed the

fascist regimes in Germany, Italy, and Japan with the hope that they

would invade and control Russia. The Oil Rulers planned to defeat the

German, Italian, and Japanese regimes and take control of the oil

reserves in the Soviet Union. The Rockefeller circle also planned to

take control of Persian Gulf oil from the British-Persian Oil cartel

and seize control of southeast Asian oil from Royal Dutch Shell.

The United States was brought into the second world war when in July

1941, President Roosevelt signed an embargo to stop all shipping to

Japan. This was said to be in retaliation for the Japanese invasion of

French Indo-China. Roosevelt's U.S. embargo cut off the Japanese oil

supply, which would have quickly shut down Japan's entire economy. In

late November 1941 the Japanese sent a written "war warning" through

diplomatic channels to Washington, demanding that the embargo be

stopped, or else American sites in the Pacific would be attacked in

retaliation. That formal diplomatic warning was ignored and the U.S.

made no reply. Just two weeks later the Japanese bombed the American

embargo ships located in Pearl Harbor.

In 1939 and '40, the Germans and Italians did not attack Russia as the

Big Three had planned. Instead, German General Rommel rushed across

North Africa to grab the Suez Canal and control all oil shipping

through the canal. Rommel then planned to drive through to Persia and

toss out the British from the British-Persian oil fields. Meanwhile,

after a failed attack on Russia in 1939, the Japanese swept through

Southeast Asia and seized all the oil holdings of Royal Dutch Shell.

With the defeat of Japan in 1945, most of those Royal Dutch fields

came under the control of Rockefeller's Standard Oil.

Hitler had planned to capture the oil fields in Romania by 1939 so

Germany would have its own supply of oil. This was accomplished. Then

Rommel was to have captured the oil fields in Persia by 1941, the oil

fields in Russia in 1942. Only then would Hitler have sufficient fuel

for prosecuting a war with the United States. But less than a week

after the Pearl Harbor attack, the Japanese convinced Hitler to

declare war on the United States. Hitler agreed only if the Japanese

would attack Russia, since German troops were now bogged down in

Russia and Hitler would gain strategic advantage if the Russians had

to defend themselves from Japan on their eastern flank. When the

Japanese failed to attack Russia, Hitler was driven out of Russia and

now was without a fuel source. The Romanian oil fields in Ploesti were

insufficient for Germany to carry on a war on two fronts, and

Germany's war effort began to collapse.

The last major German campaign was the Battle of the Bulge, in which

Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt was to attack the invading allies

with his tanks, then capture the Allied fuel dumps. This would stop

the American and British forces and obtain the necessary fuel for

Germany to continue its war effort. But General Eisenhower ordered the

Allied fuel dumps burned and Germany was defeated.

At the end of World War II, the British-Persian Oil Company controlled

the vast oil fields in Iran. The Persians had declared their alignment

with Adolf Hitler's Nazi "Aryan Race" movement and were fully

expecting German General Rommel to come rushing across Africa and

"free" them from the British. They had even proclaimed their alignment

with Hitler by changing the name of their country from Persia to

"Aryan," (or "Iran" in the Farsi language), but the Germans failed to

save them.

To take control of Persian Gulf oil from the British, in 1954 Kermit

Roosevelt, nephew of Franklin, led an American CIA coup to take

control of Iran and place in power the American-backed Shah of Iran.

The Shah expelled the British, and Rockefeller's Standard Oil now had

control of the British-Persian petroleum fields.

In the early 1950s, Occidental Petroleum's Armand Hammer, a satrap of

the Rockefellers, negotiated a deal with Russian dictator Joseph

Stalin to buy his oil--thus effectively stealing it from the Russian

people. Russian oil was then sold on the world market at a much higher

price than Stalin could get by marketing it himself, because few

countries were willing to buy oil from Stalin.

Occidental Petroleum and Russia built two large pipelines, from the

Russian oil fields down along both sides of the Caspian Sea,

terminating in the old British-Persian--now Standard Oil--oil fields

in Iran. For the next 45 years, Russia secretly sent its oil out

through those pipelines and Standard Oil sold the oil on the world

market at the "West Texas Crude" price by calling it Iranian oil. For

almost fifty yeas most Americans have been using Russian oil in their

cars.

Standard Oil refineries, which produce gasoline from crude oil, are

located at large sea ports like San Francisco, Houston or Los Angeles,

not near any of the large American oil fields. Most oil from the

Persian Gulf is shipped in oil tankers to those large American

refinery-ports.

In 1979, the Standard Oil-backed Shah of Iran was thrown out by a

British-backed coup and the long-time British asset, Ayatollah

Khomeni, put into power. The flow of Russian oil through Iran suddenly

stopped. Other oil pipelines were constructed through Iraq and Turkey.

The Russian oil was now called OPEC Arabian-Middle Eastern oil and

marketed at the even higher "spot market" price. So in 1979, in

America and Europe, we suddenly experienced gasoline shortages and

huge increases in the price of gasoline. Also in 1979 Standard Oil-

Russian oil interests tried to secure an alternate, short, safe oil

pipeline route from Russia through neighboring Afghanistan, but this

only resulted in a prolonged war and the project was abandoned.

When the new British-controlled regime in Iran came into power, the

Rockefeller-influenced U.S. government immediately threatened to seize

$7.9 billion of Iranian assets located in the U.S. On November 4, 1979

Iranian "terrorists" captured and held hostage 65 Americans.

Essentially, Standard Oil was being blackmailed by the hostage

strategy. After lengthy negotiations, the Rockefeller-created

President Jimmy Carter approved the electronic transfer of 7.9 billion

dollars from U.S. accounts to the Iranian regime on January 20, 1981.

On Wednesday January 27, 1988, as announced in the Wall Street

Journal, Standard Oil merged with British Petroleum. This actually

represents Standard Oil's buyout of British Petroleum, the name of the

newly merged company being BP-America. The Wall Street Journal did not

see fit to mention worries about the world-wide predatory marketing

practices of a deceptively titled Standard Oil regime.

During the last 13 years, BP-America has merged with, or controls, all

of the old Standard Oil "mini-companies" which existed before the

original breakup by the U.S. government in 1911. The new Standard Oil

regime is now known as BP-AMOCO, and few people in the world realize

what has happened. It's now possible to understand why British Prime

Minister Blair has become the spokesman for the new wars against

terrorism (actually the war for Caspian Sea and Iraq oil).

At the end of WWII, General Douglas MacArthur became the military

Governor of Japan. MacArthur's assistant was Laurence Rockefeller, one

of John D. Rockefeller's four grandsons. As the second world war was

drawing to a close, the U.S. was preparing for a massive invasion of

the Japanese home islands.

The military had stockpiled vast supplies of weapons and munitions on

the island of Okinawa. Some sources claim that with Vice-governor

Laurence Rockefeller's assistance most of the armaments were sold to

the leader of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, for something like one U.S. dollar

and Ho's "goodwill." One might wonder why these expensive and critical

military supplies were "given" to the North Vietnamese.

To answer that question we have to go to an almost unknown study in

the 1920's prepared by a man named Herbert Hoover, later to become

President of the United States. The study showed that one of the

world's largest oil fields ran along the coast of the South China Sea

right off French Indo-China, now known as Vietnam. This was before

offshore drilling had been invented and before a man named George

Herbert Walker Bush was to become the CEO of a world-wide offshore

drilling company.

In 1945, Vietnam was still a colony of the French. Laurence

Rockefeller, it appears, had given the extensive store of weapons to

Ho Chi Minh with the hope that Vietnam would drive out the French so

that Standard Oil would be able to take over the as yet undeveloped

offshore fields. In 1954, Vietnamese General Giap finally defeated and

drove out the French at Dien Bien Phu with weaponry provided by the

U.S. However, Ho Chi Minh reneged on the deal since he could read too,

and he was well aware of the Hoover resource report and knew there was

a vast supply of oil off the Vietnamese coast.

"In the 1950's a method of undersea oil exploration was perfected

which used small explosions deep in the water and then recorded the

sound echoes bouncing off the various layers of rock below. The

surveyor could then determine the exact location of the arched salt

domes which hold the accumulated oil beneath them. But if this method

were used off the Vietnam coast on property Standard didn't own or

have the rights to, the Vietnamese, the Chinese, the Japanese and

probably even the French would quickly run to the United Nations and

complain that America was stealing the oil, and that would shut down

the operation.

"In 1964, after Vietnam was divided into North and South, and the

contrived Gulf of Tonkin incident, several U.S. aircraft carriers were

stationed offshore of Vietnam and the 'war' was started. Every day jet

planes would take off from the carriers, bomb locations in North and

South Vietnam, and then using normal military procedure when returning

would dump their unsafe or unused bombs in the ocean before landing

back on the carriers. Safe ordnance drop zones were designated for

this purpose away from the carriers.

"Even close-up observers would only notice many small explosions

occurring daily in the waters of the South China Sea and thought it

was only part of the 'war.' The U.S. Navy carriers had begun Operation

Linebacker One, and Standard Oil had begun its ten year oil survey of

the seabed off of Vietnam. And the Vietnamese, Chinese and everybody

else around, including the Americans, were none the wiser. The oil

survey hardly cost Standard Oil a nickel, the U.S. taxpayers paid for

it."

Marshall Douglas Smith. (2001). Black Gold Hot Gold, Ch. 3

So twenty years later and 57,000 Americans and half a million

Vietnamese dead, Standard Oil had enough data and the war in Vietnam

could end. Nelson Rockefeller's personal assistant, Henry Kissinger,

represented the U.S. at the Vietnam/Paris Peace talks and won a Nobel

Peace Prize in the bargain.

After the dust had settled from the war, Vietnam divided their

offshore coastal area into numerous oil lots and allowed foreign

companies to bid on the lots, with the proviso that Vietnam got a

percentage of the action. Norway's Statoil, British Petroleum, Royal

Dutch Shell, Russia, Germany and Australia all won bids and began

drilling within their areas. Strange it was that none of them struck

oil. However, the lots which Standard Oil bid for and won proved to

have vast oil reserves. Their extensive undersea seismic research

appears to have paid off.

Unfortunately, Big Oil's greed has not abated a whit.The American and

British rulers have a new imperialistic strategy by which they hope to

gain total control of the world's energy supplies and the strategic

Eurasian land mass. First, they sell armaments to a regime (for

example, Panama, Iraq, Yugoslavia/Kosovo, Afghan/Pakistan/Taliban

Mujaheddin, Saudi Arabia). Then, they demonize the regime to which

they sold the armaments and declare war on it (e.g. Panama Invasion,

Gulf War, UN Kosovo war, Afghanistan war, Iraq War). After the war,

they station permanent military bases in the country and use the

military bases to control the energy resources in the surrounding

countries. Current U.S. foreign policy is governed by the doctrine of

"full-spectrum dominance": the U.S. must control military, economic

and political developments everywhere.

"If you want to rule the world, you need to control oil. All the oil.

Anywhere."

Monopoly, by Michel Collon

This new strategy began with the Panama invasion, next created the so-

called Gulf War, continued with the UN-sanctioned war in the Balkans,

and now expands with the new wars against terrorism (Afghanistan, the

Philippines, Iraq, and beyond). On January 20, 2001, Defense Secretary

Donald Rumsfeld said that he was willing to deploy U.S. military

forces in "another 15 countries" if that is what it takes to combat

terrorism. The reason the so-called "war against terrorism" began in

Afghanistan is because it is critical to the U.S.-British rulers'

plans to control the Caspian Sea area oil and gas.

The UN-sanctioned war in the Balkans was all about oil and the

pipeline easement for Caspian Sea oil to Western European markets

through Kosovo to the Mediterranean Sea. When Yugoslavia refused to

play ball with the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. and Germany

began a systematic campaign of destabilization, even using some of the

veterans of Afghanistan in that "war." Yugoslavia was broken up into

compliant statelets, and the former Soviet Union was contained. The

outcome: the de facto U.S. occupation of Kosovo--where America built

its largest military base since the Vietnam War

The Caspian Sea area has proven oil reserves of fifteen to twenty-

eight billion barrels plus estimated reserves of 40-178 billion, a

total of 206 billion barrels--16 percent of the earth's potential oil

reserves (compared to Saudi's 261 billion barrels of oil and America's

own 22 billion barrels). Even at today's low prices, that could add up

to $3 trillion in oil. With the Saudi regime tottering--an aging king

about to die, widespread internal corruption creating calls for

revolutionary overthrow--and a new source of oil and gas in the

Caucasus, the Standard Oil suzerainty is looking to create a new

regime in Saudi Arabia and develop a new center of operations in

Southern Asia--think Iraq.

The huge oil and gas reserves in the Caspian Sea must either be moved

west to European markets or south to Asian markets. The western route

is to move oil from Chechnya, across the Black Sea and through the

Bosporus to the Mediterranean, but the narrow Bosporus channel is

already clogged with oil tankers from the Black Sea oil fields. An

alternate route would be to move the tankers from the Black Sea,

bypassing the Bosporus, up the Danube River and then through a very

short pipeline across Kosovo to the Mediterranean at Tirana, Albania.

However, that process was stopped by the Chinese who have supplied and

armed the Albanians, as a client state, since 1949.

The other difficulty with the western route is that Western Europe is

a tough market, characterized by high prices for oil products, an

aging population, and increasing competition from natural gas.

Furthermore, the region is fiercely competitive, now being serviced by

oil from the Middle East, the North Sea, Scandinavia, and Russia.

Western Europe is not a very attractive market, because substantial

infrastructure would have to be developed to bring that oil from the

Caspian to an already overly-competitive European market.

The only other ways to get Caspian Sea oil and gas to Asian markets is

through China, which is too long a route, or through Iran, which is

politically and economically inimical to U.S.-Standard Oil objectives.

As soon as the Soviets discovered the vast Caspian Sea oil fields in

the late 1970's, they attempted to take control of Afghanistan to

build a massive north-south pipeline system to allow the Soviets to

send their oil directly through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian

Ocean seaport. The result was the decades long Soviet-Afghan war. The

Standard Oil-influenced U.S. government saw the danger of a Russian

north-south pipeline and the CIA trained and funded armed terrorist

groups, including Osama bin Laden, who defeated the Soviets in the

late 1980's.

The Russians then tried to control the flow of oil and gas through its

monopoly on pipelines. The Southern Asian Republics of the former

Soviet Union--Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and

Kyrgyzstan--saw through this Russian monopolistic ploy and began to

consult with Western companies.

The Standard Oil-influenced U.S. government now plans to thrust

further along the 40th parallel from the Balkans through these

Southern Asian Republics of the former Soviet Union. The U.S. military

has already set up a permanent operations base in Uzbekistan. The so-

called anti-terrorist strategy is clearly designed to simultaneously

consolidate control over Middle Eastern and South Asian oil, and

contain and neutralize the former Soviet Union. With that strategy,

Afghanistan is exactly where they need to be.

Russia, realizing its weaker position vis-a-vis the United States, has

been making noises as if it fully agreed with the U.S. incursions in

Afghanistan. But Russia has joined the Shangahi Cooperation

Organization (SCO) which includes China, Russia, Kazakhstan,

Kyrgyzstan, Takijistan and Uzbekistan. China is using the SCO to try

to align Russia economically and politically towards China and

northeast Asia. Russia's membership in the SCO is an attempt to

maintain its traditional hegemony in Central Asia. The underlying

rationale of the SCO is the control of its members' enormous reserves

of oil and gas.

Despite the misgivings of Russia, China, India, or any other nation,

Afghanistan and Iraq will now become the base of operations in

destabilizing, isolating, and establishing control over the South

Asian regimes and the Middle-East. [Note that Iran stands between Iraq

and Afghanistan and you can understand why bush included Iran in the

"Axis of Evil."] After the conquest of this area is complete and the

permanent military posts are set up, they will begin construction of a

pipeline through Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan to deliver

petroleum to the Asian market.

UNOCAL, the spearhead for Standard Oil interests, has been trying to

build the north-south pipeline through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the

Indian Ocean for several decades. In 1998, the California-based

UNOCAL, which held 46.5 percent stakes in Central Asia Gas (CentGas),

a consortium that planned an ambitious gas pipeline across

Afghanistan, withdrew in frustration after several fruitless years.

The pipeline was to stretch 1,271 km from Turkmenistan's Dauletabad

fields to Multan in Pakistan at an estimated cost of $1.9 billion. An

additional $600 million would have brought the pipeline to energy-

hungry India.

In the spring of 2001, Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney's

company, signed a major contract with the State Oil Company of

Azerbaijan to develop a 6000-square-meter marine base to support

offshore oil construction in the Caspian Sea. The base will be used to

assist Halliburton's catamaran crane vessel, the Qurban Abbasov, in

upcoming offshore pipe-laying and subsea activities, according to a

statement the company released May 15, 2001.

UNOCAL cut off its earlier agreement with the Taliban in 1998 when it

became clear that the Taliban could not control all of Afghanistan and

provide a stable political environment for a north-south pipeline

construction project. It was likely at this juncture that a new "war

against terrorism" ploy was conceived by the Standard Oil-influenced

U.S. government. The "war against terrorism" in Afghanistan has come

to a hiatus, with war-lords once again ruling the country, and the

Bush administration has put their own man, Karzai, in power to control

Afghanistan.

Karzai was a top adviser to UNOCAL during the negotiations with the

Taliban to construct a Central Asia Gas (CentGas) pipeline from

Turkmenistan through western Afghanistan to Pakistan. Karzai is the

leader of the southern Afghan Pashtun Durrani tribe. A member of the

mujaheddin that fought the Soviets during the 1980s, Karzai was a top

contact for the CIA, maintaining close relations with CIA Director

William Casey, Vice President George Bush, and their Pakistani Inter

Service Intelligence (ISI) Service go-between. After the Soviet Union

left Afghanistan, the CIA sponsored the relocation of Karzai and a

number of his brothers to the U.S.

The real motives for the Bush administration's war in Afghanistan are

clear for all to see. The U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan, Wendy

Chamberlain, met with Pakistan's oil minister, Usman Aminuddin, in

January, 2002 to continue plans for the north-south pipeline,

encouraging the construction of Pakistan's Arabian Sea oil terminus

for the pipeline.

President Bush says our military will continue its presence in

Afghanistan, which means that while the U.N. forces serve as a

paramilitary police force, U.S. soldiers will be guarding the

construction of the north-south pipeline.

To assure that the pipeline project will proceed apace, the Afghani-

American Zalmay Khalilzad, a previous member of the CentGas project,

became President Bush's Special National Security Assistant. Khalilzad

has recently been named presidential Special Envoy for Afghanistan.

Khalilzad is a Pashtun and the son of a former government official

under King Mohammed Zahir Shah. Along with being a consultant to the

RAND Corporation, he was a special liaison between UNOCAL and the

Taliban government. Khalilzad also worked on various risk analyses for

the project under the direction of National Security Advisor

Condoleezza Rice, a former member of the board of Chevron.

Now that the Afghanistan portion of the "war on terrorism" is

concluded--with permanent U.S. military bases in Uzbekistan and

Afghanistan in place--where next will the Standard Oil-influenced U.S.

government look to gain further control over oil in the world?

Coincidentally, most of those places are in countries which have been

branded as harborers of terrorists: Iraq, Syria, Iran, and South

America, among others.

Bush Sr.'s Gulf War in 1991 resulted in securing access to the huge

Rumaila oil field of southern Iraq by expanding the boundaries of

Kuwait after the war. This allows Kuwait, controlled by Standard Oil,

to double its prewar oil output.

Iraq, which recently discovered an oil field in its western desert, is

widely regarded as having more oil than Saudi Arabia once its deposits

are developed. Prior to the 2003 U.S. preemptive invasion of Iraq,

Iraq was producing 3 million barrels a day, funneling most of it to

world markets through a United Nations-monitored program that directed

the proceeds to food and medicine for the Iraqi people. Saddam Hussein

was still exporting his oil to Syria, which was glad to resell Iraqi

oil as if it were Syrian. The United States was one of Syria's biggest

customers, because it liked the low sulfur content of Iraqi oil,

according to Nimrod Raphaeli, publisher of the Middle East Economic

News, a Washington-based newsletter. Iraq earned $1.5 billion a year

from oil smuggling and oil sales outside UN controls, through Syria,

Turkey, and Jordan, as well as by ship down the Gulf.

Beginning in September of 2001, the Bush regime threatened to include

Iraq in its "war on terrorism." Any incursion into Iraq had to deal

with the reality that American companies, such as Cheney's Halliburton

and G.E. were making billions in Iraq by selling them goods and

services. Also, the difficulty that the eradication of the Saddam

Hussein regime would seriously compromise America's establishment of

bases on the Arabian peninsula on the pretext of protecting poor Arab

sheikhs against the Iraqi Evil Monster.

Prior to the 2003 Iraq war, Saddan was desperately trying to

ingratiate himself with the Gulf Arab Cooperation Council (GCC)

members: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United

Arab Emirates (UAE) to gain support for the lifting of the U.N.

sanctions against it. Russia, Iraq's closest U.N. Security Council

ally and a major beneficiary of contracts to purchase Iraqi oil and to

sell Iraq humanitarian supplies, was demanding "a comprehensive

settlement" of the sanctions issue, including steps leading to lifting

the military embargo against Iraq. On January 24, 2002, Russian

Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov made a formal statement that Moscow was

opposed to any U.S. military operation against Iraq.

Russia's Lukoil Oil Company and two Russian government agencies had a

23-year contract to develop Iraq's West Qurna oil field. By the terms

of the contract, Lukoil was to get one half, Iraq one quarter, and the

Russian government agencies were to get one quarter of the oil field's

667 million tons of crude, potentially a $20 billion deal. Iraq still

owed Russia at least $8 billion from the old cold war days when Russia

armed Iraq, considering it a client state. Is it any wonder that

Russia opposed Bush's war on Iraq?

But because of United Nations sanctions on Iraq, Lukoil had not pumped

a drop from West Qurna since it won drilling rights in 1997. In 2001,

Saddam gave Russia $1.3 billion in oil contracts under the United

Nations oil-for-food program that allowed Iraq to sell oil to buy

supplies to help Iraqi civilians. In September, 2001, Saddam announced

plans to award Russian companies another $40 billion in contracts as

soon as United Nations sanctions were lifted.

In February, 2002, Russia's foreign minister, Igor S. Ivanov, said

that Russia and Iraq saw eye to eye on questions of extremism and

terrorism and that the American-backed sanctions against Iraq were

counterproductive and should be lifted. He then emphasized that Russia

solidly opposed "spreading or applying the international antiterror

operation to any arbitrarily chosen state, including Iraq."

The 2003 Standard Oil-Bush junta war against Iraq ended all the prior

Iraqi agreements with nations such as Russia, Germany, and France. The

opposition by these Eurasian nations to Dubya's preemptive attack on

Iraq was understandable--and Dubya's rush to war with Iraq now makes

sense.

Also to be considered in any plans to extend the Standard Oil/Bush oil

imperialism is China's growing interest in supporting Middle-East

nations in their struggle against the U.S. During Jordanian King

Abdallah II's January, 2002 visit to China, Chinese President Jiang

Zemin said that China wanted stronger ties with Arab countries to help

promote peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Yeah, sure, that's

the reason China wants to put its foot into the Middle East, to

promote peace. China has supplied military weaponry to Pakistan and

may intervene if the Standard Oil/Bush imperialists continue to expand

their empire in the Middle East.

'Civilization Begins at Home' NY World, Nov. 26, 1898 But the Standard

Oil/Bush imperialists don't concern themselves with the threat of

China in the Middle East. They've seized control of Iraq's oil and now

have their eye on Syria's and Iran's oil as well. We're now in phase

two of the war on terrorism: invading countries that Bush says harbor

terrorists, with the real intent to seize those countries' energy

sources. And since U.S.-British a.k.a. Standard Oil imperialism now--

since 9/11--results in the killing of American civilians, we can say

that the next phase of the war on terrorism will soon be at a theater

near you.

U.S. soldiers are now guarding the north-south pipeline as it's built

in Afghanistan. U.S. military weaponry to protect the Cano Limon

pipelineIn the meantime, the hypocrisy of Bush's "war on terrorism" is

apparent for all to see in Colombia where Bush proposes to spend $98

million to protect Occidental Petroleum's 480-mile-long pipeline which

runs from Colombia's second-largest oil field to the Caribbean coast.

The $98 million will follow the $1.3 billion the U.S. has already

given to Colombia, ostensibly to fight the "drug terrorists." In 2001,

the Cano Limon pipeline was closed for 266 days, due to holes blasted

in it. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebels have

blown holes in the pipeline for the past fifteen years, resulting in

2.5 million barrels of spilled oil oozing into Colombia's rivers and

streams, about ten times the amount of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill

in Alaska.

If Bush enters this 38-year old conflict in Colombia which has

resulted in 40,000 deaths in the past decade, he'll be involving the

U.S. in a dead-end power struggle among FARC, the Cuban-inspired

National Liberation Army (ELN), ultra-right paramilitary groups and

the U.S.-supported fascist government. The excuse for spending U.S.

taxpayers' money in Afghanistan was that Bin Laden was responsible for

the September 11th attacks. Now the only pretext for spending

taxpayers' money in Colombia is to combat the FARC and ELN

"terrorists" who only threaten U.S. oil company resources, not

American lives.

Invading Colombia follows the British-U.S. oil imperialism pattern:

going where the oil is. According to the U.S. Department of Energy,

Colombian oil production rose from only 100,000 barrels per day in the

early 1980s to approximately 844,000 barrels in early 1999 -- an

increase of nearly 750 percent. Colombian oil exports to the United

States have also risen sharply, and today Colombia is this country's

seventh largest supplier of petroleum. Colombia harbors large reserves

of untapped oil and natural gas, possibly as much as 20 billion

barrels (and Venezuela has 73 billion barrels in proven reserves);

hence Colombia--and its oil-rich neighbor countries--become one of

many new oil imperialism targets. The United States imports more oil

from Colombia and its neighbors, Venezuela and Ecuador, than from all

of the Persian Gulf.

A revealing feature of the South American "war on terrorism" is that,

unlike the Taliban and al Qaeda, the Bush administration is not

destroying the numerous South American drug terrorists. Why? Because

the Bush administration and its plutocratic controllers are at the

center of the $1.5 trillion per year in U.S. cash transactions that

result from the international drug trade.

A drug terrorist, like a Carlos Lehder, a Pablo Escobar, an Amado

Fuentes, a Matta Ballesteros or a Hank Rohn, constantly has something

like ten billion dollars of useless illegal money that he has to put

in a cooperative bank or business venture that will launder it for

him. The drug lord is then more than happy to loan the laundered money

at five percent interest to underwrite the large corporations and

crooked politicians throughout the world.

Wall Street and the Bush administration depend on the South American

drug barons for hundreds of millions of dollars for corporate income

and election campaign finances. For every million dollars of increased

sales or increased revenues that a company like Enron realized from a

buyout, the stock equity of the one per cent who control Wall Street

increases twenty to thirty times.

Wall Street embracing drug terrorism In June, 1999, Colombia's

president Andres Pastrana arranged for Richard Grasso, head of the New

York Stock Exchange, to meet with Ra

In article <1190417169.905422.25500@57g2000hsv.googlegroups.com>,

Raymond <Bluerhymer@aol.com> wrote:

> The New U.S. (and

> -British) Oil Imperialism

>

> The Spoils of the Iraq War

>

> The war in Iraq, as has been suggested, is all about oil and most

> literate Americans already understand this. It would be far better if

> the administration admitted that it is about oil. Americans would

> support the truth

That's the problem, innit?

Americans would support the truth--so much so, that we'd be invading

Syria and Iran tonight. Instead of fighting a, by comparison, lightly

blooded proxy war.

--

NeoLibertarian