Sat Mar 23, 2024 11:33 pm by globalturbo
Secrets of the Elite:
Why Forbes’s Rich List Doesn’t Include the Wealthiest Families On the Planet
As Oxfam warns that global wealth inequality is spiraling out of control, we ask why the Rothschilds and Rockefellers are missing from the business magazine's definitive annual guide...with some startling revelations
“Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.”
This is a House of Rothschilds maxim, widely attributed to banking tycoon Mayer Amschel Rothschild in 1838 and said to be a founding principle for the highly corrupt banking and political system we have today. Along with the Rockefellers, the Rothschild dynasty is estimated to be worth well over a trillion dollars. How are these powerful families linked to the ongoing crisis of global wealth inequality, why are so many people unaware of their existence, and why doesn’t Forbes ever mention them in their annual list of the world’s wealthiest people?
Global wealth inequality is out of control, and it’s no accident
In January 2014, Oxfam announced that the richest 85 people on the planet share a combined wealth of $110 trillion. The figure was based on Forbes’s rich list 2013, and it equates to 65 times the total wealth of the entire bottom half (3.5 billion) of the world’s population. While some deluded commentators welcomed this as “fantastic news,” the rest of us were disgusted. Winnie Byanyima, Oxfam’s executive director, said at the time: “It is staggering that in the 21st Century, half of the world’s population own no more than a tiny elite whose numbers could all fit comfortably on a double-decker bus.”
Two months later, following Oxfam’s calculation and having published the new 2014 rich list, Forbes journalist Kasia Morena did some fact-checking. She found that the number of billionaires owning the same as the poorest 3.5 billion had dropped from 85 to 67: which demonstrates an enormous widening of the global inequality gap in just one year.
Fast-forward to 2015, and another Oxfam investigation. The anti-poverty charity warned in January that if nothing is done to tackle global wealth inequality- by forcing corporations to pay their taxes and closing off-shore tax havens, for example- the richest 1% will own more than everybody else in the world combined by 2016. In a paper called Wealth: Having it all and wanting more, Oxfam outlined how the richest 1 percent have seen their share of global wealth increase from 44% in 2009 to 48% in 2014, and will likely surpass 50% in 2016. Winnie Byanyima again warned that the explosion in inequality is holding back the fight against global poverty at a time when one in nine people do not have enough to eat, and more than a billion people still live on less than $1.25 a day.
The organization also outlined how 20 percent of billionaires around the world have interests in the financial and insurance sectors, a group that saw their cash wealth increase by 11 percent in the last 12 months. Billionaires listed as having interests in the pharmaceutical and healthcare sectors saw their collective net worth increase by 47 percent, and the industry spent more than $500 million lobbying policy makers in Washington and Brussels in 2013 alone.
“Do we really want to live in a world where the one percent own more than the rest of us combined?” Byanyima asked. “The scale of global inequality is quite simply staggering, and despite the issues shooting up the global agenda, the gap between the richest and the rest is widening fast.”
Meet the people who own 50% (and counting) of the world’s wealth
Here is Forbes’s (real-time) list of the 66 billionaires who (officially) own half of all global assets, and will soon own more than the rest of Earth’s seven billion population combined. They range from CEOs of large corporations to oil and gas tycoons and Silicon valley entrepreneurs. The list details name, net worth, percentage change since the 2015 results, their age, industry and nationality. Bill Gates is ranked first at $469 billion, and James Simons at #66 with the $14 billion he made from hedge funds.
But where are the world’s Royal families? And more to the point, where are the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers? These two families have an unimaginable amount of wealth that surpasses the trillion mark- they are the only trillionaires in the world, and yet they are missing from Forbes’s list every single year, along with the handful of other men commonly believed to own our politicians, our media, our corporations, our scientists, and even our money supply.
Five of the most powerful and wealthiest men in the world belong to the Rothschild and Rockefeller dynasties. How much power do they hold, and why do we hear so little of them?
The Rothschild and Rockefeller Dynasties: With great power comes great secrecy
Forbes’s rich list doesn’t include members of Royal families or dictators who hold their wealth through a position of power, or who control the riches of their country. In this way, the real people pulling the strings are able to work in absolute secrecy without any media attention at all (unless it is carefully-constructed positive propaganda, like this article on the philanthropy of the Rothschilds, of course). Forbes’s policy to exclude heads of state from the rich list explains why the Queen of England is absent, although nobody has the slightest idea of her wealth in any case: her shareholdings remain hidden behind Bank of England Nominee accounts.
As the Guardian newspaper reported in May 2002: ‘The reason for the wild variations in valuations of her private wealth can be pinned on the secrecy over her portfolio of share investments…Her subjects have no way of knowing through a public register of interests where she, as their head of state, chooses to invest her money. Unlike [British politicians and Lords], the Queen does not have to annually declare her interests and as a result her subjects cannot question her or know about potential conflicts of interests…’
The same can be said for the Rothschilds and Rockerfellers, whose European forebears were richer than any Royal family at the time. The families are believed to have set up and own the Federal Reserve (G Edward Griffin’s The Creature From Jekyll Island and this research by journalist Dean Henderson are recommended reading if you want to get deeper into this topic). Could this be why the families, whose power in manipulating global affairs for the past few hundred years cannot be underestimated, are protected by Forbes’s ‘don’t even go there’ policy? Retired management consultant Gaylon Ross Sr, author of Who’s Who of the Global Elite, was apparently told in 1998 that the combined wealth of the Rockefeller family was approx $11 trillion and the Rothschilds $100 trillion…what might that figure have reached 17 years later? One can hardly begin to imagine, but maybe money isn’t the most important thing to your average trillionaire, anyway…
“The only problem with wealth is, what do you do with it?” was a rhetorical question posed by none other than John D. Rockefeller. Well, if Aaron Russo’s testimony is to be believed, all the Rockefeller riches in the world certainly won’t be used to benefit the human race…
Russo’s Rockefeller revelations: False flags, power grabs, and an enslaved population
Russo, a film-maker and activist who directed America: From Freedom to Fascism, claimed that Nick Rockefeller told him about ‘an event that would allow us to invade Afghanistan and Iraq’ some eleven months before 9/11, and foretold the fact that the ‘War on Terror’ would be a hoax wherein soldiers would be looking in caves for non-existent enemies (see video). In the interview, Russo claims that he first met lawyer Nick Rockefeller after being introduced by a mutual attorney friend. The two men hit it off, and later down the line Rockefeller apparently confided in Russo privately what his family had planned for the world: never-ending war, global population reduction, economic collapse, widespread chaos and disorder on such a scale that people would actually welcome the ultimate ‘solution’: a one-world government. He was speaking in October 2000, and most of his predictions have now come to pass- including 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror.
Russo claimed that Rockefeller asked him to be on the Council For Foreign Relations (CFR), but the man who spent his career fighting for freedom and exposing the Fed Reserve supposedly told Rockefeller that he couldn’t possibly go along with these sinister plans for mankind. “As much as I like you Nick, I don’t believe in enslaving people. We’re on opposite sides of the fence,” Russo told Nick. To which Rockefeller apparently replied: “Why do you care about those people? Take care of your own life; do the best you can for you and your family.” Russo concludes: “There was just a lack of caring; it was just cold.”
He goes on, “I used to say what the point, Nick? You have all the money in the world, you have all the power in the world, whats the end goal?” Rockefeller is said to have responded bluntly: “To get everyone chipped.” According to this theory, the families who own the banking system are bored of their wealth, it is no longer enough. To control society itself is the ultimate end-game. According to Russo, Rockefeller told him that a global government would slowly phase out paper money from circulation, with its eventual aim being to microchip the population, turning us all into slaves of the NWO.
These are wild claims indeed, and from a journalistic point of view, they cannot be verified one way or the other. But it’s worth noting that just before Russo died in August 2007, he filmed a moving message to all Americans. In it, he talked about how vital it is for people to continue to resist national ID cards and microchips, and fight for their individual freedoms against those who would enslave us. It’s also worth pointing out that it’s not only activists like Russo and scare-mongering patriots like Alex Jones who have tried to ‘out’ the Rothschilds and Rockefellers. The problem is, all those who do so are silenced.
Ashley Mote, a member of the European Parliament serving British independence party UKIP, asked the following question in Brussels, and retribution was swift: “Mr President, I wish to draw your attention to the Global Security Fund, set up in the early 1990s under the auspices of Jacob Rothschild. This is a Brussels-based fund and it is no ordinary fund: it does not trade, it is not listed and it has a totally different purpose. It is being used for geopolitical engineering purposes, apparently under the guidance of the intelligence services. I have previously asked about the alleged involvement of the European Union’s own intelligence resources in the management of slush funds in offshore accounts, and I still await a reply. To that question I now add another: what are the European Union’s connections to the Global Security Fund and what relationship does it have with European Union institutions?”
This is exactly the kind of question the European public would like an answer to. Yet Mote did not receive one. Instead, the 79 year old politician was sacked from his own party, and later arrested and sent to jail for allegedly claiming false expenses during his time as an MEP. Mote claimed throughout his trial that he was ‘targeted for being anti-Europe’, and said the money he claimed was used to pay third-party whistleblowers in a quest to uncover corruption and fight for democracy and transparency in European politics.
Like everything else relating to the people who really run the show, the truth is out there…but it’s almost impossible to pin down.
This article (Secrets Of The Elite: Why Forbes’s Rich List Doesn’t Include The Wealthiest Families On The Planet) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and TrueActivist.com.
From True Activist @ http://www.trueactivist.com/secrets-of-the-elite-why-forbess-rich-list-doesnt-include-the-wealthiest-families-on-the-planet
The Shady Past of the Rockefeller Family & Its Haunting Effect on the World
by Christina Sarich
Perhaps you have heard of the Rockefellers, and the often romantic tale told of the riches that accompany their mark on Americana. John Davidson Rockefeller, (1839-1937) the patriarch of the family, was the first billionaire in the United States. Often we are told he lived the American dream, pulling himself up by his boot straps and working tirelessly to build his family’s wealth. The truth that has come out over the years, however, is that Rockefeller was a Nazi sympathizer and fascist wealth gatherer who used others for his own whims.
Rockefeller amassed his wealth almost entirely with a global strong hold on oil production – a habit common to companies that rape foreign soil and instigate war, and are still practicing today. He also dabbled in steel, railroads and banking, establishing monopolies in the industries he pursued. His grandfather was a snake-oil salesman who sold ‘cancer’ cures to the public, mostly women, as he traveled across the United States, calling himself, ‘the celebrated Dr. Livingston.’ There’s nothing like good press and propaganda to make a decent living. The same man was also indicted for rape, but never formally charged.
The Rockefeller duplicity of character and complete disregard for public health have carried into almost every aspect of modern corporatism. We no longer make laws based on the well being of the public at large. Corporations are allowed to dump toxins like oil into oceans, and are free to grow and market GM foods when they are proven to cause cancer, stop organ functioning and cause infertility. Banking systems, via the Federal Reserve, and other fluffy brokerage houses are given carte blanch to rape us, by gambling away our money, sucking down an ever-expanding barrel of cash through tax dollars, and shoving huge debts off onto the people of multiple countries. We are also sold ‘cancer’ cures in the form of chemo and radiation when they are being proven to cause death in many cases while definitely supporting a booming industry monopolized by a small handful of pharmaceutical companies.
We’ve been sold snake oil, in the very least, and it appears more likely that we are part of a greater plan, which the Nazis first introduced pre-WWII, and which the Rockefellers sympathized with. Eugenics, or population cleansing and control are happening whether you want to use that specific terminology or not.
In the 1900s, a group of Californians exported the idea of Eugenics, to Nazi Germany. It became the third state to instate laws that supported cleansing for a ‘master race.’ Ultimately, in California, and other states, eugenics practitioners coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in “colonies,” and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just learning about. (hnn.us)
With chemtrails, antibiotic-induced super bugs, hormone laden farm animals, super weeds and people like Dr. Oz saying that ‘organic food is elitist’ in a recent Time magazine article, it starts to make you wonder.
Joseph Pulitzer is digging deeper into the Rockefeller past and if nothing else, it points to our ‘roots’ in corporate wealth in ways that many of us have never imagined were possible. The legacy of the Rockefeller family has impacted our country but also the global culture in very real ways.
America is based on lies and usury at best, and pure evil at worst when you consider the mindset of those who would sterilize unsuspecting women. So what can we do to take back our country? Corporate capitalism and ‘inverted totalitarianism’ obviously haven’t worked. Are there better ways for people to survive in today’s toxic world?
Gift economies have been suggested, with a radical belief that the more you give, the more you get. This type of economy would also drive people to give form their true passions, instead of being motivated purely by greed. Others have suggested returning to a simpler way of life, choosing to purchase fewer things, and invest more in people and experiences. Ultimately it will have to be a system of governance that honors both the individual and the whole, with a truly integrated benevolence that honors both. Communism only honors the grand ideas of an ‘all-seeing’ or ‘all-knowing’ leader, subsuming the individual completely into complete oblivion. Capitalism is all self-centered. A new world will have to look hard and cold at our past mistakes, and take into account the needs of both the microcosmic part and the macrocosmic whole.
If you have suggestions on how to organize society to avoid the greed that has currently compromised the entire global parade, please suggest them below.
From Waking Times @ http://www.wakingtimes.com/2013/06/05/the-shady-past-of-the-rockefeller-family-its-haunting-effect-on-the-world/
[size=32]How Big Oil Conquered the World[/size]
By the 1880s, the American oil industry was the Standard Oil Company. And Standard Oil was John D. Rockefeller. But it wasn’t long until a handful of similarly ambitious (and well-connected) families began to emulate the Standard Oil success story in other parts of the globe.
One such competitor emerged from the Caucasus in the 1870s, where Imperial Russia had opened up the vast Caspian Sea oil deposits to private development. Two families quickly combined forces to take advantage of the opportunity: the Nobels, led by Ludwig Nobel and including his dynamite-inventing prize-creating brother Alfred, and the French branch of the infamous Rothschild banking dynasty, led by Alphonse Rothschild.
In 1891, the Rothschilds contracted with M. Samuel & Co., a Far East shipping company headquartered in London and run by Marcus Samuel, to do what had never been done before: ship their Nobel-supplied Caspian oil through the Suez Canal to East Asian markets. The project was immense; it involved not only sophisticated engineering to construct the first oil tankers to be approved by the Suez Canal Company, but the strictest secrecy. If word of the endeavour was to get back to Rockefeller through his international intelligence network it would risk bringing the wrath of Standard Oil, which could afford to cut rates and squeeze them out of the market. In the end they succeeded, and the first bulk tanker, the Murex, sailed through the Suez Canal in 1892 en route to Thailand.
In 1897 “M. Samuel & Co.” became The Shell Transport and Trading Company. Realizing that reliance on the Rothschild/Nobel Caspian oil left the company vulnerable to supply shocks, Shell began to look to the Far East for other sources of oil. In Borneo they ran up against Royal Dutch Petroleum, established in The Hague in 1890 with the support of King William III of the Netherlands to develop oil deposits in the Dutch East Indies. The two companies, fearing competition from Standard Oil, merged in 1903 into the Asiatic Petroleum Company, jointly owned with the French Rothschilds, and in 1907 become Royal Dutch Shell.
Another global competitor to the Standard Oil throne emerged in Iran at the turn of the 20th century. In 1901 millionaire socialite William Knox D’arcy negotiated an incredible concession with the king of Persia: exclusive rights to prospect for oil throughout most of the country for 60 years. After 7 years of fruitless search, D’Arcy and his Glasgow based partner, Burmah Oil, were ready to abandon the country altogether. In early May of 1908 they sent a telegram to their geologist telling him to dismiss his staff, dismantle his equipment and come back home. He defied the order and weeks later struck oil.
Burmah Oil promptly spun off the Anglo-Persian Oil Company to oversee production of Persian oil. The British government took 51% majority control of the company’s shares in 1914 at the behest of Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, and survives today as BP.
The Rothschilds and Nobels. The Dutch royal family. The Rockefellers. These early titans of the oil industry and their corporate shells pioneered a new model for amassing and expanding fortunes hitherto unheard of. They were the scions of a new oligarchy, one built around oil and its control, from wellhead to pump.
But it was not just about money. The monopolization of this, the key energy resource of the 20th century, helped secure the oiligarchs not just wealth but power over the lives of billions. Billions who came to depend on black gold for the provision of just about every aspect of their daily lives.
In the late 19th century, however, it was by no means certain that oil would become the key resource of the 20th century. As cheap illumination from the newly-commercialized light bulb began to destroy the market for lamp oil, the oiligarchs were on the verge of losing the value from their monopoly. But a series of “lucky strikes” was about to catapult their fortunes even further.
The very next year after the commercial introduction of the light bulb, another invention came along to save the oil industry: German engineer Karl Benz patented a reliable, two-stroke internal combustion engine. The engine ran on gasoline, another petroleum byproduct, and became the basis for the Benz Motorwagen that, in 1888, became the first commercially available automobile in history. And with that stroke of luck, the business that Rockefeller and the other oiligarchs had spent decades consolidating was saved.
But more luck was needed to ensure the market for this new engine. In the early days of the automobile era it was by no means certain that gas-powered cars would come to dominate the market. Working models of electric vehicles had been around since the 1830s, and the first electric car was built in 1884. By 1897 there was a fleet of all-electric taxis shuttling passengers around London. The world land speed record was set by an electric car in 1898. By the dawn of the 20th century electric cars accounted for 28% of the automobiles in the United States. The electrics had advantages over the internal combustion engine: they required no gear shifting or hand cranking, and had none of the vibration, smell, or noise associated with gasoline-powered cars.
Lady Luck intervened again on January 10, 1901, when prospectors struck oil at Spindletop in East Texas. The gusher blew 100,000 barrels a day and set off the next great oil boom, providing cheap, plentiful oil to the American market and driving down gas prices. It wasn’t long before the expensive, low range electric engines were abandoned altogether and big, loud, gas-guzzling engines came to dominate the road, all fueled by the black gold that Standard Oil, Shell, Gulf, Texaco, Anglo-Persian and the other oil majors of the time were drilling, refining and selling.
Perhaps John D.’s greatest stroke of luck, however, was not supposed to be luck at all. Rockefeller had come under increasing scrutiny by a public outraged by the unprecedented wealth he had amassed through Standard Oil. Muckraking reporters like Ida Tarbell began digging up the dirt on his rise to power through railroad conspiracies, secret deals with competitors and other shady practices. The press pictured him as a colossus with bribed politicians literally in the palm of his hand; Standard Oil was a menacing octopus with its tentacles strangling the lifeblood of the nation. Hearings began, investigations were launched, lawsuits were brought against him. And then, finally, in 1911 the Supreme Court made a monumental decision.
Narrator: On May 15th, 1911, the Supreme Court of the United States declared that Standard Oil was a monopoly in restraint of trade and should be dissolved. Rockefeller heard of the decision while golfing at Kykuit with a priest from the local Catholic church, Father J.P. Lennon.
Ron Chernow, Biographer: And Rockefeller reacted with amazing aplomb. He turned to the Catholic priest and said, “Father Lennon, have you some money?” And the priest was very startled by the question and said, “No.” And then he said, “Why?” And Rockefeller replied, “Buy Standard Oil.”
Narrator: As Rockefeller foresaw, the individual Standard Oil companies were worth more than the single corporation. In the next few years, their shares doubled and tripled in value. By the time the rain of cash was over, Rockefeller had the greatest personal fortune in history — nearly two percent of the American economy.
Ron Chernow, Biographer: And it was really losing the antitrust case that converted John D. Rockefeller into history’s first billionaire. So that Standard Oil was punished in the federal antitrust case, but John D. Rockefeller, Sr. most assuredly was not.
To the amazement of the world, Rockefeller’s punishment had in fact been his reward. Rather than being taken down a peg, the splitting up of the Standard Oil monopoly had launched him as the world’s only acknowledged billionaire at a time when the average annual income in America was $520.
Rockefeller’s story was perfectly mirrored by the story of Colonel Edwin Drake. Having struck oil in Titusville and given rise to a billion dollar global industry, Drake had not had the foresight to patent his drilling technique or even to buy up the land around his own well. He ended up in poverty, relying on an annuity from the state of Pennsylvania to scrape together a living and dying in 1880.
For the oiligarchy, the lesson of the rise and rise of Rockefeller was obvious: the more ruthlessly that monopoly was pursued, the tighter that control was grasped, the greater the lust for power and money, the greater the reward would be in the end.From now on, no invention would derail the oil majors from their quest for total control. No competition would be tolerated. No threat to the oiligarchs would be allowed to rise.
When asked how he could justify the treachery and deceit with which he pursued the creation of the Standard Oil monopoly, John D. Rockefeller is reputed to have said: “Competition is a sin.” This is the mentality of the monopolist, and it is this justification, framed as religious conviction, that drove the oiligarchs to so ruthlessly eliminate anyone who would dare rise up as a pretender to their throne.
Ironically, it was the competition between the oiligarchs in the early 20th century that helped give rise to an early external threat to their empire: alcohol fuel.
As historian Lyle Cummins has noted of the period: “The oil trust battles between Rockefeller, the Rothschilds, the Nobels and Marcus Samuel’s Shell kept prices in a state of flux, and engines often had to be adaptable to the fuel that was available.”
In many areas where oil wasn’t available, the alternative was alcohol. Ethyl alcohol had been used as a fuel for lamps and engines since the early 19th century. Although it was generally more expensive, alcohol fuel offered a stability of supply that was alluring, especially in areas like London or Paris that did not have predictable access to oil supplies.
Alcohol has a lower heat value, or BTU, than gasoline, but a series of tests by the US Geological Survey and the US Navy in 1907 and 1908 proved that the higher compression ratio of alcohol engines could perfectly offset the lower heat value, thus making alcohol and gasoline engines fuel economy equivalent.
One early supporter of alcohol fuel was Henry Ford, who designed his Model T to run on either alcohol or gasoline. Sensing an opportunity for new markets to boost the independent American farms that he felt were vital to the nation, Henry Ford told the New York Times:
“The fuel of the future is going to come from fruit like that sumach out by the road, or from apples, weeds, sawdust – almost anything. There is fuel in every bit of vegetable matter that can be fermented.”
Farmers, looking to capitalize on this, lobbied for the repeal of a $2.08 per gallon alcohol tax that had been imposed to help pay for the Civil War. They were aided by those who saw fuel alcohol as a way to break the oiligarchs’ monopoly. In support of a bill to repeal the alcohol tax, President Teddy Roosevelt told the US Congress in 1906:
“The Standard Oil Company has, largely by unfair or unlawful methods, crushed out home competition. It is highly desirable that an element of competition should be introduced by the passage of some such law as that which has already passed the House, putting alcohol used in the arts and manufactures upon the free list.”
The alcohol tax was repealed in 1906 and for a time corn ethanol at 14 cents a gallon was cheaper than gasoline at 22 cents a gallon. The promise of cheap, unpatentable, unmonopolizable fuel production, production open to anyone with raw vegetable matter and a still, swept the nation.
But cheap, plentiful fuel that can be grown and produced locally and independently is not what the oiligarchs had in mind.
A 1909 USGS report comparing gas and alcohol engines had noted that a significant point in alcohol fuel’s favour was that there were fewer restrictions on alcohol engines. For the oiligarchs, the answer was simple: find a way to place greater restrictions on alcohol engines. Thankfully for them, the answer to their problem was already gaining popular support.
In the 19th century, America had a drinking problem. By 1830, the average American over 15 years old drank seven gallons of pure alcohol per year, three times higher than today’s average. This led to the first anti-alcohol movements in the 1830s and 1840s, and the formation of the Prohibition Party in 1869 and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in the 1870s. The movement enjoyed widespread and growing support but had few political successes; Maine flirted with prohibition by outlawing the sale and manufacture of liquor in 1851, but the ban only lasted five years.
This changed with the formation of the Anti-Saloon League in Standard Oil’s birth state of Ohio in 1893. The ASL was started by John D. Rockefeller’s long-time personal friend Howard Hyde Russell and was bankrolled in part by generous annual donations from Rockefeller himself. The ASL, with Rockefeller’s backing, quickly became the driving force behind a national movement to outlaw the production and sale of alcohol.
Rockefeller was a teetotaler himself, not from moral concern but because he was afraid that “good cheer among friends” would lead to his downfall in business. Stephen Harkness, one of the silent partner investors in Standard Oil and a director in the company until his death, had caught Rockefeller’s eye when he made a fortune buying up whiskey in advance of a new excise tax that he had been tipped about and selling it at a huge profit after the tax kicked in.
No, Rockefeller and Standard Oil were not concerned about the moral state of the nation…except as far as it impacted their bottom line. But when prohibition did come in 1920, it had an interesting side effect: although it didn’t ban the use of ethanol as a fuel directly, it did lead to increasingly burdensome restrictions requiring producers to add petroleum products to their ethanol to make it poisonous before it could be sold. Alcohol fuel, now completely unable to compete with gasoline, was abandoned altogether by the automobile industry.
Another existential threat to the vast fortunes of the early oiligarchs was to require an even greater effort at social engineering: public transportation.
By the end of World War I, private car ownership was still a relative rarity; only one in 10 Americans owned a car. Rail was still the transportation of choice for the vast majority of the public, and city-dwellers in most major cities relied on electric trolley networks to transport them around town. In 1936, General Motors formed a front company, “National City Lines,” along with Firestone Tire and Standard Oil of California, to implement a process of “bustitution”: scrapping streetcars and tearing up railways to replace them with GM’s own buses running on Standard Oil supplied diesel. The plan was remarkably successful.
As historian and researcher F. William Engdahl notes in “Myths, Lies and Oil Wars”
“By the end of the 1940s, GM had bought and scrapped over one hundred municipal electric transit systems in 45 cities and put gas-burning GM buses on the streets in their place. By 1955 almost 90% of the electric streetcar lines in the United States had been ripped out or otherwise eliminated.”
The cartel had been careful to hide their involvement in National City Lines, but it was revealed to the public in 1946 by an enterprising retired naval lieutenant commander, Edwin J. Quinby. He wrote a manifesto exposing what he called “a careful, deliberately planned campaign to swindle you out of your most important and valuable public utilities–your Electric Railway System.” He uncovered the oiligarchs’ stock ownership of National City Lines and its subsidiaries and detailed how they had step by step bought up and destroyed the public transportation lines in Baltimore, Los Angeles, St. Louis and other major urban centres.
Quinby’s warning caught the attention of federal prosecutors and in 1947 National City Lines was indicted for conspiring to form a transportation monopoly and conspiring to monopolize sales of buses and supplies. In 1949, GM, Firestone, Standard Oil of California and their officers and corporate associates were convicted on the second count of conspiracy. The punishment for buying up and dismantling America’s public transportation infrastructure? A $5,000 fine. H. C. Grossman, who had been the director of Pacific City Lines when it oversaw the scrapping of LA’s $100 million Pacific Electric system, was fined exactly $1.
Unsurprisingly, GM and its associates did not remain in the doghouse for long. In 1953 President Eisenhower appointed Charles Wilson, then the President of General Motors, as Secretary of Defense. Wilson, with Francis DuPont of the Rockefeller-connected DuPont family as Chief Administrator of Federal Highways, oversaw one of the largest public works projects in American history: the creation of the interstate highway system. With a war-era excise tax on train tickets still in place and federally funded highways and airports providing cheaper alternatives, rail travel declined a startling 84% between 1945 and 1964.
This social engineering paid off well for Standard Oil and its growing list of petrochemical associates. In the two and a half decades after the outbreak of World War II, vehicle production in Detroit almost tripled, from 4.5 million cars a year in 1940 to over 11 million in 1965. As a result, sales of refined gasoline over the same period rose 300%...
SOURCE: The Rockefellers - Xcerpted from The Corbett Report @ https://www.corbettreport.com/episode-310-rise-of-the-oiligarchs/
For more information about global control see [url=http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/global control]http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/global%20control[/url]
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