While Americans are robbed at the gas pump, Exxon Mobil will this week report a 60% increase in its quarterly net profits to a cool $10 billion.\u00a0 Royal Dutch\/Shell will report a 30% increase.<\/p>\n
In 1975 British writer Anthony Sampson penned The Seven Sisters<\/em>, bestowing a collective name on a shadowy oil cartel, which throughout its history has sought to eliminate competitors and control the world\u2019s oil resource.\u00a0 Sampson\u2019s \u201cSeven Sisters\u201d name came from independent Italian oil man Enrico Mattei.<\/p>\n In the 1960\u2019s Mattei began negotiating with Algeria, Libya and other nationalistic OPEC states who wanted to sell their oil internationally without having to deal with the Seven Sisters.\u00a0 Algeria had a long history of defying Big Oil and was once ruled by President Houari Boumedienne, one of the great Arab socialist leaders of all time, who initiated the original ideas for a more just \u201cNew International Economic Order\u201d in fiery speeches at the UN, where he encouraged producer cartels modeled on OPEC as a means to Third World emancipation.<\/p>\n In 1962 Mattei died in a mysterious plane crash.\u00a0 Former French intelligence agent Thyraud de Vosjoli says French intelligence was involved.\u00a0 William McHale of Time <\/em>magazine, who covered Mattei\u2019s attempt to break the Big Oil cartel, also died under strange circumstances.<\/p>\n A tidal wave of mergers at the turn of the millennium transformed Sampson\u2019s Seven Sisters \u2013 Royal Dutch\/Shell, British Petroleum, Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, Texaco and Gulf \u2013 into a more tightly controlled cartel which, in my book Big Oil & Their Bankers<\/em>\u2026, I term the Four Horsemen: Exxon Mobil, Chevron Texaco, BP Amoco and Royal Dutch\/Shell.<\/p>\n By the late 1800\u2019s John D. Rockefeller had become popularly known as \u201cthe Illumination Merchant\u201d during a time when oil was powering the reading lamps of every American household.\u00a0 Rockefeller figured out that it was the refining of oil into various end products and not actual crude production which held the key to control of the industry.<\/p>\n By 1895 his Standard Oil Company owned 95% of all refineries in the US while expanding operations overseas.\u00a0 Summing up his attitude towards his new oil monopoly, Rockefeller once stated, \u201cThe day of combination is here to stay.\u00a0 Individualism is gone never to return\u201d.<\/p>\n Rockefeller\u2019s Standard Oil Trust began illuminating the New World with funding from Kuhn Loeb and Rothschild banking families.\u00a0 While the Rockefellers worked the American side of the energy matrix, the Rothschilds consolidated their control over Old World oil resources.<\/p>\n By 1892 Shell Oil, under the direction of Marcus Samuel, began shipping South Sea crude through the new Suez Canal to supply Europe\u2019s factories.\u00a0 Shell took its name from the abundance of seashells which lined the shores of the Dutch-controlled archipelago that is now Indonesia.\u00a0 The Samuel family controls London\u2019s biggest merchant bank Hill Samuel, along with the trading house Samuel Montagu.<\/p>\n In 1903 the Swedish Nobel and the French Rothschild\u2019s Far East Trading \u2013 financed by King Wilhelm III \u2013 combined with Samuel and Oppenheimer\u2019s Shell Oil to form the Asiatic Petroleum Company.<\/p>\n In 1927 Royal Dutch Petroleum discovered oil at Seria off the coast of Brunei, whose Sultan would become the world\u2019s richest man as a result of his loyalty to Royal Dutch.\u00a0 The Dutch and British monarchs who control Royal Dutch merged their company with the Oppenheimer and Samuel\u2019s Shell Oil and Nobel and Rothschild\u2019s Far East Trading and\u00a0Royal Dutch\/Shell was born.\u00a0 Queen Beatrix of the Dutch House of Orange and Lord Victor Rothschild are its two largest shareholders.<\/p>\n In 1872 Baron Julius du Reuter was granted his 50-year concession in Iran.\u00a0 In 1914 the British government took control of his Anglo-Persian Company and renamed it Anglo-Iranian, then British Petroleum, then BP.\u00a0 Britain\u2019s House of Windsor controls a large stake in BP Amoco while the Kuwaiti monarchy owns 9.5%.<\/p>\n In 1906 the US government ordered the dissolution of Rockefeller\u2019s Standard Oil Trust, charging that Standard violated the new Sherman Anti-Trust Act.\u00a0 On May 15, 1911 the US Supreme Court declared, \u201cSeven men and a corporate machine have conspired against their fellow citizens.\u00a0 For the safety of the Republic we now decree that this dangerous conspiracy must be ended by November 15th\u201d.<\/p>\n But the breakup of Standard Oil along state lines only served to increase <\/em>the wealth of the Rockefeller family, who retained 25% interest in each new company.\u00a0 Soon the new companies began to reintegrate.<\/p>\n The new Standard Oil of New York merged with Vacuum Oil to form Socony-Vacuum, which became Mobil in 1966.\u00a0 Standard Oil of Indiana joined with Standard Oil of Nebraska and Standard Oil of Kansas and in 1985 became Amoco.\u00a0 In 1972 Standard Oil of New Jersey became Exxon.\u00a0 In 1984 Standard Oil of California joined with Standard Oil Kentuckyto become Chevron.\u00a0 Standard Oil of Ohio (Sohio) retained the Standard brand until it was bought by BP, which also bought trust-baby Atlantic Richfield (ARCO).\u00a0 Thus the Rockefellers came to own a large chunk of BP.<\/p>\n By 1920 Exxon, BP and Royal Dutch\/Shell dominated the world\u2019s booming oil business, with the Rockefeller, Rothschild, Samuel, Nobel and Oppenheimer families, along with British and Dutch royals owning the brunt of their stock.\u00a0 Two other Rockefeller babies, Mobil and Chevron, weren\u2019t far behind the Big Three.\u00a0 The Texas Murchison family \u2013 themselves patronized by the Rockefellers \u2013 controlled Texaco, while the Mellon family \u2013 with its own ties to the Rockefeller fortune \u2013 controlled Seventh Sister Gulf Oil.<\/p>\n The first known attempt by the Seven Sisters to stifle competition came in 1928 when Sir John Cadman of British Petroleum, Sir Henry Deterding of Royal Dutch\/Shell, Walter Teagle of Exxon and William Mellon of Gulf met at Cadman\u2019s castle near Achnacarry, Scotland.\u00a0 Here an agreement was reached that would divide up the world\u2019s oil reserves and markets.<\/p>\n The Achnacarry Agreement<\/em> became known to oil industry insiders as the As Is Agreement because its aim was to maintain a status quo<\/em> under which the Seven Sisters controlled the world\u2019s oil through market share agreements, sharing of refining and storage facilities, and by agreeing to limit production to keep prices high.<\/p>\n Big Oil signed three more agreements in the next six years.\u00a0 The 1930 Memorandum of Understanding for European Markets<\/em> was followed by the 1932 Heads of Agreement for Distribution<\/em> and the 1934 Draft Memorandum of Principles<\/em>.<\/p>\n Between 1931 and 1933 the Four Horsemen ruthlessly cut the price for East Texas crude from $.98\/barrel to $.10\/barrel.\u00a0 Many Texas wildcatters were run out of business.\u00a0 Those that remained were forced to agree to strict production quotas under threat of ruin by the majors \u2013 quotas that still exist to this day.\u00a0 It is these quotas, not \u201cthe environmentalists\u201d (as the reactionary right claims) that serve to keep the US dependent on Persian Gulf oil, where Big Oil dominates the game.<\/p>\n By taking the oil industry international \u2013 which requires billions in capital \u2013 the Four Horsemen keep independent challenges to their hegemony at bay.\u00a0 They also put thousands of US oil workers out of jobs in Texas and Louisiana.<\/p>\n John D. Rockefeller himself did not control crude reserves.\u00a0 Instead he invested heavily in refining and cut deals with the Morgan-controlled railroads to cut his shipping costs.\u00a0Texas wildcatters had to pay much more to ship their oil.\u00a0 They possessed neither the esoteric knowledge of refining crude, nor the capital to build expensive refineries.\u00a0 All their money was tied up in drilling rigs, which were not cheap either.<\/p>\n Today the Rockefeller family fortune is even more heavily invested in downstream oil operations such as petrochemicals and plastics, as well as in industries that are dependent on oil such as banking, aerospace and automobiles.<\/p>\n In the 1980\u2019s long-time Chase Manhattan chairman David Rockefeller invested $35 billion in Singapore, which has since become an important refining and storage center.\u00a0 Royal Dutch\/Shell\u2019s largest single refinery is at Pulau Bukom, Singapore.\u00a0 In 1991, as the Asian Tigers began to roar, Exxon Mobil introduced unleaded gas to Thailand, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Singapore.\u00a0 It produces it at its giant Jurong refinery in Singapore.<\/p>\n The Four Horsemen have followed the money downstream.\u00a0 They are the world\u2019s largest refiners and marketers of crude oil in all of its various end-product forms.\u00a0 Royal Dutch\/Shell is both the leading marketer and refiner of crude oil and is currently the source of one in ten barrels of refined product in the world.\u00a0 Its bottom line has benefited greatly from this downstream move with the firm showing record profits starting in 1988 and many years since.\u00a0 Seventy-seven percent of Shell profits now come from petrochemicals.<\/p>\n Shell also owns the world\u2019s largest refinery complex on the Netherlands Antilles island of Aruba, just off the Venezuelan coast.\u00a0 In 1991 Shell sold an outdated refinery on the neighboring island of Curacao while upgrading its Aruba facilities.\u00a0 The completion of this massive complex caused Venezuelan crude to become much more important to global oil supply.\u00a0 Crude from African nations like Nigeria and Angola is also refined at the Shell Aruba facility, which sits next to a hulking Exxon Mobil refinery named Lago<\/em>, after Venezuela\u2019s Lake Maracaibo, from where most Venezuelan crude is derived.<\/p>\n Royal Dutch\/Shell is currently focused on development of natural gas markets, investing heavily in Middle Distillate Synthesis (MDS) plants that convert liquefied natural gas to high-grade liquid products.\u00a0 By 1996 they had built MDS facilities in Malaysia, Nigeria and Norway.\u00a0 In 1993 Shell joined with Mitsubishi and Exxon Mobil in a $3 billion natural gas project in Venezuela and launched a $1.1 billion petrochemical expansion in Brazil.\u00a0 That same year BP Amoco discovered huge oilfields in neighboring Columbia.<\/p>\n By 1969 Exxon owned 67 oil refineries in 37 countries.\u00a0 Over 60% of Exxon\u2019s 1991 profits came from downstream operations.\u00a0 In the first quarter of that year alone, Exxon made a $2.4 billion profit, the highest quarterly profit since Rockefeller founded Standard Oil of New Jersey in 1882.\u00a0 It was no coincidence that the Gulf War was being prosecuted during this time, with Exxon meeting much of the demand generated by the US military and its allies.<\/p>\n In the early 1990\u2019s Exxon bought the plastics division of Allied Signal and entered joint ventures with both Dow and Monsanto in the thermoplastic elastomer realm.\u00a0 According to Exxon Mobil\u2019s 2001 10K filing to the SEC, the company netted $17 billion in year 2000.\u00a0 From 2003-2006, during the US occupation of Iraq, the company regularly broke its own record for biggest quarterly profit by any corporation in US history.<\/p>\n Recently the Four Horsemen have been swimming back upstream, becoming the top four retailers of gas in the US.\u00a0 They own every major pipeline in the world and the vast majority of oil tankers.\u00a0 Royal Dutch\/Shell has 114 ships in its armada.\u00a0 Recently the company added seven giant liquefied natural gas tankers.\u00a0 Shell has 133,000 employees worldwide and in 1991, boasted assets of $105 billion.\u00a0 Shell\u2019s Bullwinkle oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico is taller than the world\u2019s highest building.<\/p>\n Exxon Mobil leads the way in producing lubricant base stocks and its scientists invented butyl rubber.\u00a0 It has operations in 200 countries and is the only firm that operates in the harsh Beaufort Sea, where it built 19 islands of steel to drill from.\u00a0 Exxon owns most of the land inYemen (5.6 million acres), Oman and Chad.\u00a0 Its 1991 assets totaled $87 billion.<\/p>\n The latest wave of mergers in the oil industry began in the early 1960\u2019s.\u00a0 Eight of the top twenty-five oil companies in 1960 had merged by 1970.\u00a0 Exxon bought Monterey Oil and Honolulu Oil.\u00a0 Chevron scooped up Standard Oil of Kentucky.\u00a0 Atlantic Oil merged with Richfield Refining to form ARCO, which then gobbled up Sinclair.\u00a0 Marathon Oil bought Plymouth Refining.<\/p>\n Another merger wave ensued in the 1980\u2019s.\u00a0 Chevron bought Gulf in 1984.\u00a0 Texaco purchased Getty Oil. \u00a0Mobil bought Superior Oil.\u00a0 BP grabbed both Britoil and Sohio (Standard Oil of Ohio).\u00a0 ARCO bought City Services.\u00a0 US Steel purchased Marathon Oil.\u00a0 The 1984 discovery of North Sea oil consolidated the position of Big Oil \u2013 especially Royal Dutch\/Shell and Exxon \u2013 whose Shell Expro joint venture was awarded the prime concessions.<\/p>\n In 1985 Shell bought Occidental Petroleum\u2019s Columbian interests.\u00a0 In 1988 it took over Tenneco\u2019s assets in that country.\u00a0 The 1990\u2019s saw Amoco (Standard Oil of IN) hitching its wagons to BP to form BP Amoco.\u00a0 In 1999 BP Amoco bought ARCO, giving the company 72% ownership of the Alaskan Pipeline.<\/p>\n Exxon bought Texaco Canada and Mexico\u2019s Compania General de Lubricantes<\/em> in 1991.\u00a0 Conoco was purchased by DuPont.\u00a0 In March 1997, Texaco and RD\/Shell merged their US refining operations.<\/p>\n The final and most dramatic wave of consolidation saw Exxon merge with Mobil in November 1999.\u00a0 That same year Chevron bought Thailand\u2019s Rutherford-Moran Oil and Argentina\u2019s Petrolera Argentina San Jorge<\/em>.\u00a0 In July 2000 Chevron merged its petrochemical business with that of Phillips to form Chevron Phillips Chemical Company.\u00a0 That same year Chevron tied the knot with Texaco.<\/p>\n On August 30, 2002 Conoco\u2019s merger with Phillips Petroleum was approved creating Conoco Phillips, which in 2005 bought coal titan Burlington Resources.\u00a0 In 2002 Royal Dutch\/Shell bought up previously merged Pennzoil\/Quaker State as well as Britain\u2019s biggest remaining independent oil company \u2013 Enterprise Oil.\u00a0 In 2005 Chevron Texaco bought Unocal.\u00a0 And Four Horsemen rode on.<\/p>\n The Four Horsemen have interlocking directorates with the international mega-banks.\u00a0 Exxon Mobil shares board members with JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Royal Bank of Canada and Prudential.\u00a0 Chevron Texaco has interlocks with Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase.\u00a0 BP Amoco shares directors with JP Morgan Chase.\u00a0 RD\/Shell has ties with Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, N. M. Rothschild & Sons and Bank of England.<\/p>\n Former Citibank chairman Walter Shipley sat on Exxon Mobil\u2019s board, as did Wayne Calloway of Citigroup and Allen Murray of JP Morgan Chase.\u00a0 Willard Butcher of Chase sat on the board of Chevron Texaco.\u00a0 Former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan came from Morgan Guaranty Trust and served on the board of Mobil.\u00a0 BP Amoco director Lewis Preston went on to become president of the World Bank.<\/p>\n Other BP Amoco directors have included Sir Eric Drake, the #2 man at the world\u2019s largest port operator P&O Nedlloyd and a director at Hudson Bay Company and Kleinwort Benson.\u00a0 William Johnston Keswick, whose family controls Hong Kong powerhouse Jardine Matheson, also sat on the board of BP Amoco.\u00a0 Keswick\u2019s son is a director at HSBC.\u00a0 The Hong Kong connection is even stronger at Royal Dutch\/Shell.<\/p>\n Lord Armstrong of Ilminster sat on the boards of Royal Dutch\/Shell, N. M. Rothschild & Sons, Rio Tinto and Inchcape.\u00a0 Cathay Pacific Airlines owner and HSBC insider Sir John Swire was a director at Shell, as was Sir Peter Orr, who joins Armstrong on Inchape\u2019s board.\u00a0 Shell director Sir Peter Baxendell joins Armstrong on the board of Rio Tinto, while Shell\u2019s Sir Robert Clark sits on the board of the Bank of England.<\/p>\n As a result of the deregulation craze in the US companies no longer have to report their top shareholders to the SEC.\u00a0 According to 1993 10K reports filed by the Four Horsemen, the Rothschild, Rockefeller and Warburg banking combines still control Big Oil.\u00a0 The Rockefellers exert control through New York mega-banks and Banker\u2019s Trust, which in 1999 was purchased by Warburg-controlled Deutsche Bank in its bid to become the largest bank in the world.<\/p>\n As of 1993 Banker\u2019s Trust was #1 shareholder in Exxon.\u00a0 Chemical Bank was #4 and J.P. Morgan was #5.\u00a0 Both are now part of JP Morgan Chase.\u00a0 Banker\u2019s Trust was also leading shareholder at Mobil.\u00a0 BP listed Morgan Guaranty as its biggest owner in 1993, while Amoco listed Banker\u2019s Trust as its #2 shareholder.\u00a0 Chevron listed Banker\u2019s Trust as its #5 shareholder, while Texaco listed J.P. Morgan as its #4 owner and Banker\u2019s Trust as #9.<\/p>\n Thus, Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan Chase \u2013 the banks of Warburg and Rockefeller \u2013 have increased shares in Exxon Mobil, BP Amoco and Chevron Texaco.\u00a0 Rothschild-controlled Bank of America and Wells Fargo exert West Coast control over Big Oil, while Mellon Bank also remains a big player.\u00a0 Wells Fargo and Mellon Bank were both top 10 shareholders of Exxon Mobil, Chevron Texaco and BP Amoco as of 1993.<\/p>\n Information on Royal Dutch\/Shell is even harder to obtain since they are registered in the UK and Holland and are not required to file 10K reports.\u00a0 It is 60% owned by Royal Dutch Petroleum of Holland and 40% owned by Shell Trading & Transport of the UK.\u00a0 The company has only 14,000 stockholders and few directors.\u00a0 The consensus from researchers is that Royal Dutch\/Shell is still controlled by the Rothschild, Oppenheimer, Nobel and Samuel families along with the British House of Windsor and the Dutch House of Orange.<\/p>\n Queen Beatrix of the Dutch House of Orange and Lord Victor Rothschild are the two largest shareholders.\u00a0 Queen Beatrix\u2019 mother Juliana was once the richest woman in the world and a patroness of the right-wing occult movement.\u00a0 Prince Bernhard, who married Juliana in 1937, was a member of the Hitler Youth Movement, the Nazi SS and an employee of Nazi combine I.G. Farben.\u00a0 He sits on the boards of over 300 European companies and founded the Bilderbergers.<\/p>\n When you\u2019re being robbed, it\u2019s always a good idea to be able to identify the perp.\u00a0 Now if only we could get the cops to bring em\u2019 in\u2026<\/p>\n