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July 93, #115 ->
America's Dictators
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July 93, #115 ->
America's Dictators
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The landed estate of the American people is the resource base upon which American economy functions, and our survival and future welfare depend upon the thought we give to its best use and how we can achieve it. A system based upon ruthless exploitation and exponential growth on a finite Earth cannot continue without our destruction.
America is a civilization of extraneous energy and metals. Who- so-ever controls the energy and mineral resources critical to the functions that govern our lives, controls and dictates our individual destiny and the continued evolution of our technological culture. Environmental breakdown and the exhaustion of the Earth's finite resources, fostered by ignorance, arrogance and greed, form the threats to the peace and security of our nation that Howard Scott in 1963 identified as The Continuing Crisis, which is the subject of this report.
Man's impulse to dominate as well as to destroy is proving continuously disastrous, not only in the political and social sense, but in the physical sense. For man's destructiveness has turned not only upon himself but upon his own good earth--the wellspring of his life.
In 1939, Dr. Hugh H. Bennett, Soils Conservation Service, USDA, in testimony to a Congressional committee stated: "In the short life of this country we have essentially destroyed 282 million acres
of land, crop and range land. Erosion is destructively active on 775 million additional acres. Almost 100 million
acres of cropland, much of it representing the best cropland we have, is finished in this country. We cannot restore it."
In the late 1970's, American farmers were losing nearly as much topsoil as they had lost during the Dust Bowl yearsof the 1930s.
"Every grain of wheat and rye, every sugar beet, every egg and piece of veal, every spoonful of olive oil and glass of wine depends on an irreducible minimum of earth to produce it. The earth is not elastic, it cannot be stretched;the human race, every nation, is limited in the number of acres it possesses. And as the number of human beings increases, the relative amount of productive earth decreases by that amount." (World Watch, 2- 1-93)
Thirty years have passed since Howard Scott gave his technical analysis of the factors and components that comprise The Continuing Crisis: land, soil, water, mineral resources, energy and population growth. It was his broad spectrum of knowledge, high intelligence, strategical genius and integrity that developed an idea for human survival that is in harmony with the facts and social needs of humanity. It constitutes the plan of social operations for the North American Continent known as Technocracy. His brilliance and prescience serve humanity today as a Polar star.
If we are to survive and continue to progress intellectually, it is imperative that any projection of the research data, and additions or modifications thereto, or omissions, be carefully verified by critical minds. The inclusion of the latter type of data when applied to a particular category often requires further defining for exactitude, necessitated by the import ofother limiting factors. To illustrate--the critical import and impact of unconsidered factors are revealed in U.S. Department of Agriculture data, and provisos incorporated by Congress in the Food Security Act of 1985, which scheduled a shift of 45 million acres of highly erodable, unsustainable acres of cropland to grassland and woodland. If 40 million of the 45 million acres to be retired was in grain, it was estimated the unsustainable output would amount to 48 million metric tons.
In addition to mining soil, which has continued from the founding of our nation, some farmers are also mining underground water supplies. The fossil aquifer depletion of the Ogallala, which supplies irrigation water in the Great Plains from Nebraska to Texas panhandle, is an example. It is reported that the effect of its falling water level on irrigation has been traumatic. In the six states that rely most heavily on the Ogallala--Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas--, irrigated area declined 15 percent between 1978 and 1984.
A U.S. Department of Agriculture study reported that the water table is falling at least 6 inches, and in some cases up to several feet per year on over 14 million of the 30 million acres irrigated with groundwater. When the land eventually reverts to dry-land farming or range land, grain production will be reduced by an estimated 9 million tons. Combining this figure with the grain output on highly erodable land, yields of a total of 57 million metric tons of grain output per year are listed as unsustainable.
In 1985, in an analysis of Third World nutrition, it was estimated that the impact of population growth between 1970 and 1980 had increased the number of malnourished people from some 680 million to 730million.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Economic Research Service (ERS), and World Indices, in 1986 warned that if , as projected, another billion people are added to world population over the remaining years of this century, the world grain harvested area, which dropped from 0.24 hectares per capita in 1950 to 0.15 hectares in 1986, will shrink to 0.12 hectares per person.
Population projections for those Third World countries where life support-systems are already disintegrating can only be described as projections of disaster.
In 1984 the United States accounted for 44% of the world's cereal exports. Consider previously mentioned data regarding the destructive mining of the soil, the unsustainable millions of acres of cropland, and the continuous exhaustive depletion of the Ogallala aquifer.
In 1985 there were 2,275,000 farms in the United states with a population of 5,355,000, comprising 2.2% of the U.S. total population. 256 million acres of cropland were harvested for domestic use, 1.07 acres per capita.
A major shift in American population away from the farm has taken place within the last 20 years. In 1910, 32 million lived on farms; today (1992) 4.5 million do, and many of those still living there have jobs other than growing crops. Why? A demographer at the Department of Agriculture points to mechanization, chemicals and better seeds. It has been succinctly stated that, "When the Constitution was signed, 90 percent of the U.S. population lived on farms...Only 2 percent of Americans rise with the rooster now."
In 1985, U.S. farm technology included the following:
The amount of energy used in U.S. agriculture for producing food on farms in 1979 was estimated to be about 2.1 quads/year. The conversion factor of quad as a unit of energy measurement of petroleum equals 181 million barrels. Of the 2.1 quad, about half, or 190 million barrels, is actually consumed as fuel on the farm, and about half is used in producing fertilizer, pesticides, and other farm chemicals.
Livestock inventory and production --milk cows, poultry, etc., and their environmentally controlled habitat requirements are in separate categories.
By 1986, in North America, which produces nearly one-fourth of the world's grain, four-fifths of all the oil discovered to date had already been consumed.
Agriculture as an energy conversion system in a technological culture is highly vulnerable to the availability of fossil fuel energy.
A report entitled "Armed Force and Imported Resources" by the Center for Defense Information, 1992, merits attention, in particular the research data on petroleum and accompanying evaluation. Quote: "The United States is by far the world's largest consumer of petroleum. Compared to other industrialized countries, we use 20% more petroleum to produce a given quantity of goods and services, and our per capita is almost double. Our per capita use of all forms of energy is more than six times the world average.
"Adding the cost of oil itself to the cost of military forces maintained to assure access to oil supplies brings the total cost for Americans to at least $90 per barrel. Even this startling figure ignores the dollar cost of Desert Shield/Storm, most of which has been covered by payments from the U.S. allies."
The report quotes U.S. Geological Survey experts as predicting that the world's supply of oil suitable for fuel "will be mostly exhausted by the middle of the 21st Century." As developing nations grow in industrial activity, increasing demands upon this shrinking supply are expected to "aggravate 'North-South' tensions that are already apparent in standards of living."
America's social traitors, whose strategy of power, plunder and profit in the exploitation of our oil and mineral resources has made our country a "have-not" nation, are now transnationals whose aggressive policies are supported by the military and underwritten with the lives of American youth.
There are little known factors of great social significance, whose exposure offers a new evaluation of our ever expanding political, economic and military ventures over the past 72 years on the continent of Africa, that are surfacing anew in the tragedy that is Somalia. Ventures whose corruptions are only surpassed by betrayal and the planned plunder of the resources of the peoples of continental Russia, who were our allies in two World Wars.
President Kennedy in June 1963, in attesting to their valor and commitment as an ally stated, "No nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union suffered in the causeof the Second World War. At least 20 million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and farms were burned or sacked. Hospitals, schools, theaters and museums wrecked. A third of the nation's territory, including nearly two thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland--a loss equivalent to the devastation of this country east of Chicago."
So with the dismemberment of the Soviet Union, and in the shambles they helped dictate and create, America's corporate structures, like vultures, have come to roost.
As reported after World War I, there was a struggle for power in the Middle East where the British and the French were in the process of dismembering the old Ottoman Empire as spoils of the war. In 1921 Herbert Hoover, then U.S. Secretary of Commerce, persuaded seven U.S. oil companies to act under the American flag as a consortium in a joint venture known as Iraq Petroleum Co., (formerly Turkish Petroleum Co.), with British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell, and the French National Oil Company as founding conspirators.
In the consortium were Jersey Standard (EXXON), New York Standard (MOBIL), Texas Oil (ARCO), that later absorbed Sinclair, Mexican Oil and Gulf. Under the direction of the U.S. Department of State they were organized as the Near East Development Corporation. Of the group only two, Jersey Standard and New York Standard, continued as participants in the formation of the first international petroleum cartel. They were to share a 23.7% interest in Iraq Petroleum Co. Negotiations to form IPC went on for three years, between 1925 and 1928. In 1928 Jersey Standard and New York Standard joined with Anglo-Iranian Oil (later to become British Petroleum), Shell, the French National Oil Company, and Gulbenkian, the legendary Armenian entrepreneur and promoter of Iraq Petroleum, in its various exploitations.
IPC was set up not merely to exploit the oil resources of Iraq but any oil that might be found in a huge area extending from Turkey down to the tip of Saudi Arabia. British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell and the French National Oil Company each also received a 23.7% stake in the company. The area mapped to be exploited was incorporated within the Red Line Agreement and encompassed Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and what is now Jordan. All exploration and production was to be conducted by IPC acting exclusively as a group. The Red Line Agreement continued in effect until 1948. Iran was outside the Red Line, but British Petroleum already held a concession there. Also, just outside the Red Line was the little sheikdom of Kuwait.
Gulf Oil, which had separated itself from the cartel, sought to gain access to Kuwaiti oil, but its entry was blocked through opposition by British Petroleum.
In March 1932 President Herbert Hoover appointed his former Treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon, one-time president of Gulf Oil, as the U.S. Ambassador to Britain. From his strategic position in London, Mellon argued vociferously thecase for Gulf, in which his family happened to own a 25% interest.
The Gulf-BP conflict ended in a typical international oil settlement. On December 23, 1934, Gulf and BP signed an agreement with Kuwait for joint exploration. Oil was first found in Kuwait in 1938, but World War II postponed development. The first shipment of oil did not leave Kuwait until 1946.
Gulf loaded the Kuwaiti oil on their tankers and sold it around the world. They became Japan's number one oil supplier. Gulf's privileged concession was reduced when the Kuwaiti oil fields were taken over by the government of Kuwaiti in the wake of the formation of OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) in the 1970s.
Gulf refineries in Canada produced much of the oil that comes out of Nigeria, Angola, Gabon and Zaire.
During the 1960/70 decade Gulf officials were engaged in political bribery at home and abroad by means of a slush fund that was funneled through a largely dormant subsidiary in the Bahamas. The moneys were disbursed in the U.S. to Republican and Democratic politicians alike.
In 1971 the fund was solicited for a $100,000 contribution to a presidential campaign fund. (Nixon)
In Korea, where Gulf was constructing a huge refinery known as the Pittsburgh of Korea, prominent political leaders demanded extortion, one of whom in 1970 is said to have crudely demanded $10 million of the president of Gulf stating, "I'm not here to debate matters. You are either going to put up the goddamn money or suffer the consequences."
Disclosure of the slush fund triggered a 364-page report prepared by Gulf's attorneys at the insistence of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Chevron purchased Gulf in 1984.
America's corporate structures in their devotion to profit are above such considerations as family, country, war or morality. Never was this more evident than in the development of the finite energy resources of petroleum, natural gas and coal.
EXXON: Standard Oil of New Jersey (Exxon) is a product of the ruthless and corrupt practices employed by John D. Rockefeller in the destruction of competitors who refused to be included in a monopoly controlover refining and transportation of oil. It was reported that his younger brother, who was a partner in a firm competing with Standard Oil, refused and was forced into bankruptcy. It was reported, quote: "He eventually moved his two children's bodies from the family burial plot in Cleveland so they would not have to spend eternity in the company of John D. Rockefeller. He remained bitter for the rest of his life.
"Rockefeller looked back on this period with great piety. Late in life he told a biographer that, 'The Standard was an angel of mercy, protecting its less fortunate competitors from the risks and hazards of the refining business.'"By 1880 Rockefeller was refining 95% of the nation's oil. By 1885, 70% of Standard Oil's sales were overseas. In 1888 he reorganized the trust as a holding company. In 1911 the Supreme Court declared Standard Oil an illegal monopoly. Out of its dissolution came 34 separate companies. By 1980, 14 of the original 34 survived under new logos, including Mobil, Exxon, Chevron, Amoco, Sohio.
As previously noted, in 1921 at the urging of Herbert Hoover and the U.S. Department of State, Standard Oil of New Jersey (EXXON), and Standard Oil of New York (MOBIL) became participants in the formation of the first international oil cartel, marking the start of American involvement in Middle East oil.
In 1926 Jersey Standard and I.G. Farben chemical company of Germany had made a secret research agreement. After Hitler came into power in 1933, Jersey Standard gave Germany patents vital to the production of aviation fuel.
In 1954, the U.S. Department of State once again came to the aid of Jersey Standard. After the CIA-aided overthrow of the government of Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran and the return to power of the Shah, Jersey Standard was requested to participate in organizing a new consortium to operate the Iranian oil properties previously exploited by British Petroleum. Standard Oil of New Jersey became EXXON in 1972.
The Middle East is a tangled web of intrigue and greed whose aftermath has given us Iran/Contra, Desert Storm and the hidden agenda of Somalia.
When Britain created Iraq in 1922 out of the spoils of the defunct Ottoman Empire, it represented an amalgam of three ethnically or religiously distinct former Turkish provinces: Kurdish-domination Mosul in the north, Sunni Muslim Baghdad in the center, and Shiite Muslim Basra in the south. Ever since then, Iraqi history has been dominated by the struggle to instill a greater national identity over these three rival tribes.
Experts warn that the rising American drumbeat for war and for the destruction of Hussein's regime demonstrates a dangerous oversimplification of Iraq and the Middle East and the forces that could be unleashed if fighting erupts. The fall of Hussein's regime could lead to the balkanization of Iraq, probably along the same Ottoman lines that existed before 1922. Iraq's former name was Mesopotamia.
CHEVRON: In 1932 Standard Oil of California (CHEVRON or SOCAL) struck oil on the Persian Gulf island of Bahrain and obtained from King Ibn Saud the concession for oil fields on the Arabian peninsula named after his clan, Saudi Arabia. In 1936 Chevron merged its production operations with the marketing and refining facilities of Texaco to form CALTEX, a 50-50 partnership, to which later were added SOCALS concessions in Sumatra, Java and New Guinea.
In 1937, at the height of the Spanish Civil War, Texaco supplied Franco's fascist regime with oil. After the outbreak of World War II it not only continued to ship oil to Germany, but in June, 1940, it also provided an office and support to a Nazi intelligence officer, a German lawyer named Dr. Gerhardt Westrick, in their Chrysler Building headquarters. As published in the new York Herald Tribune, his mission included a very accurate review of the American aircraft industry prepared by Texaco's economists.
Howard Scott's comments in 1950 in Cleveland, OH, describing America's change in the direction of fascism, included the critical details of exposure that ended the espionage at Texaco in 1941 prior to Pearl Harbor.
In the 1990s Chevron disposed of approximately 1400 of its 1800 domestic oil fields resulting in a 20% decline in domestic oil production from 1990 levels, slashed its work force by 2,500 jobs and in addition announced a pay freezeof its 20,000 nonunion employees.
Chevron's focus was on West Africa where the company inherited operations as part of its purchase of Gulf Oil in 1984. Africa now accounts for about two-thirds of its overseas' earnings. It also has been expanding its tanker fleet to help ship more crude between West Africa and the U.S. East Coast. This includes Chevron's tanker, George Shultz. (Shultz is the former U.S. Secretary of State and a Chevron director.)
In East Africa, prior to the overthrow of President Mohammed Siad Barre January 1991, Chevron, Conoco, Amoco and Phillips Petroleum reportedly were allocated exclusive concessions to explore and exploittens of millions of acres of Somalia's countryside.
Conoco Inc. permitted its Mogadishu corporate compound to be transformed into a defacto American embassy a few days before the U.S. Marines landed in the capital to bring pacification to this tragic impoverished nation. A spokesmanfor Conoco Oil in Houston described the arrangement as "a business relationship."
In April 1993 it was reported that Chevron signed a joint venture contract dubbed Tengizchevroil, with the republic of Kazakhstan to tap the oil-rich Tengis area on the northeast shore of the Caspian Sea. It underscores the San Francisco based Chevron's ongoing strategy of emphasizing foreign oil operations while turning away from domestic drilling. The project is expected to encourage similar oil-drilling ventures involving Amoco, British Petroleum and Exxon among other oil giants and former Soviet republics.
Mobile: Corporate strategy, power and ingenuity are not lacking originality. In 1866 Vacuum Oil Company devised a method for making kerosene by distilling crude oil in a vacuum. In 1882 Rockefeller bought the company and made it part of his newly organized Standard Oil trust, of which Standard Oil Company of New York (SOCONY) was the administrative arm.
In the early 1900s SOCONY developed a huge market in China by introducing kerosene lamps. In 1926 SOCONY found a supplier for all the kerosene lamps of china by buying General Petroleum, which had oil wells in California's Central Valley and a 200- mile pipeline (the world's first) to their refinery on the coast near Los Angeles.
In 1931 SOCONY rejoined forces with Vacuum, its former associate in the Standard Oil Trust, changing the company name to Socony- Vacuum. In 1933, to serve their growing markets in the Far East, they joined with Jersey Standard (now EXXON) in a venture called Stanvac, paralleling the Caltex organization formed by Texaco and California Standard.
Using Jersey Standard's oil wells and refinery in Indonesia and Socony-Vacuum's huge marketing apparatus in the Far East, Stanvac built an oil-selling operation in 50 countries that spread from the east coast of Africa to New Zealand. Federal trust busters broke up Stanvac, 1962, leaving each company with half the assets of operation.
On December 2, 1823, President Monroe, in his annual message to Congress, proposed a Doctrine containing four major points that included (1) the American continents were no longer to be considered as subjects for future colonization by European powers (2) the U.S. would consider dangerous to its peace and safety any attempt on the part of European powers to extend their systems to any point in the Western Hemisphere.
A century later the creators of Trusts, holding companies and multinational consortiums operate incognito, betraying public trust and loyalty to country. Since August 1990, Presidential exemption from federal conflict-of-interest laws was quietly given by Bush to top federal administrative officials with a financial interest in oil production, so that he could get their "advice on policies and military measures." Eleven were exempted with regard to the invasion of Kuwait and 13 in the Libya case.
It is a great distance beyond the historical boundaries of the Monroe Doctrine and from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli. Was it the intent to establish navaland air bases to make of the Mediterranean an American Mare Nostrum, thereby assuring safe passage to the tanker fleets of the Six Sisters and their plunder of oil riches from Africa's Third World countries? The lives of too many American Marines have already been sacrificed to this purpose.
Having engaged in the carnage and devastation, the death and destruction of World War II, the resource position of Continental United States is distinctly critical as Technocracy's research and U.S. Department ofInterior data revealed. It no longer has the capacity to "light all the lamps of China", nor the mineral resources to furnish the exports for the increased dollar profits of American business world-wide.
In the closing years of the 19th Century, a philosophic justification for exploitive expansionism and class stratification was provided by historians, professors, clergymen and other intellectuals who found a basis for imperialism in Charles Darwin's theories. It was a corruption of science, a twisted, distorted contention that among nations, or "races", as well as biologic species, there is an inborn struggle for existence and only the fittest could survive. If the strong dominated the weak, that was in accordance with the laws of nature. It is an advocacy that has been arrogantly expressed and enforced by dictators of all persuations.
The organic law of our nation, which was formulated in secret session and under strict censorship, did not codify the unalienable rights of all citizens. It is the anti-democratic expression of intensely property conscious thinkers, and was especially addressed to holdings in the more fluid forms of capital investment, chiefly identified with commerce, finance, and other speculative ventures. It is not a political Decalogue but the politics of the lineal successors to medieval barons imposed upon a disenfranchised majority. Plunderers were given recognition and sanction in April 1789 when the Senate was founded as the statutorygoverning body created to protect and advance the exclusive interests of the accumulators of fiscal wealth and property.
Cynically, in 1889 "it was the Senate of the Fifty-first Congress, known ever since as 'The Millionaire's Club', that, man for man, 'The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life', (Darwin's subtitle for The Origin of Species) seemed most splendidly confirmed. The finest specimens of all, perhaps, were California's Senators, Leland Stanford, one of the 'big four' who built the Central Pacific Railroad, and gold-mining millionaire, George Hearst, father of William Randolph...Senator Hearst once told a gathering of his peers at dinner one evening, 'I do not know much about books. I have not read very much; but...I made up my mind after all my experience that the members of the Senate are the survival of the fittest.'" (The Reconstruction of American History)
Southern Pacific, founded in 1861 as the Central Pacific Railroad Company, "was one of the 19th centuries most avaricious monopolies." It is reported that its creators' skill in the use of "the time-honored techniques of graft, bribery, fraud, outright mendacity, and mastery of political subversion" inspired Frank Norris' 1901 novel, The Octopus.
The construction of the transcontinental railroad represented an era of wanton corruption and Faustian debasement. "Throughout the period, unscrupulous national state legislators were openly bought and sold by the highest bidder., and during Ulysses S. Grant's administrations (1869-1877), a large segment of the Executive branch of the national government was viciously corrupt. The Credit Mobilier, Union Pacific railroad's scandal-- involving amongothers, two Vice Presidents of the United States, Schuyler Colfax and Henry Wilson, as well as a future President, James A. Garfield--proved to be truly symptomatic of the times." Scandal also attached to the operations of the Crocker Corporation, responsible for the Central Pacific building. (Encyclopedia of American History)
In American economic history the period at the turn of the 19th century was known as the Steel Age (the Age of Metals), and the era of Robber Barons whose corrupt, ruthless, predatory proclivities were to become the prevailing mores of the 20th century in America's society, nurturing the twisted ideology of an imperial warfare-welfare State. It is a century of political/economic jingoism whose most effective apostle of commercial imperialism was Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, an advocate of Sea Power. He envisioned a navy empowered to promote and protect foreign trade, to take possession of colonies to provide raw materials and markets and to serve as bases for the military, "Whether they will or no," he proclaimed. (1897)
It was a military arrogance whose flawed calculations now endanger our survival and continued evolution as a technological culture. A century of unremitting warfare, internal strife, explosive population growth, and conspicuous waste and consumption has seriously depleted our strategic and critical mineral resources, presenting a high vulnerability to foreign influence. Of the 88 minerals the Bureau of Mines regularly tracks, the U.S. imports over half ofits needs for 34 minerals.
These are the years of an elite ruling cadre and their aides-de- camp, an interlocking directorate, a de facto government that formulates the objectives, policies, strategy and dictates that assure their powers of governance as an autarchy supplanting existing elected political authority. A fait accompli by America's Trojan Horse--the Cabinet. Whose master is to be served?
An analysis of the U.S. Cabinet and the Corporate boards of America indicate an interlocking directorate whose seats of power have alternately been occupied by the same personnel, whose stature included Secretaries of State, Defense, et al.
The ideology of America's multinational corporate structure, as exemplified by major oil companies, is directed to a world fascism as the research data in this report indicates, and as charges filed in federalcourts throughout this century against monopoly substantiate. It is time for Americans to accept their duty as citizens by challenging the dictatorial control over their destiny.
The elements exist to serve a new creative and fulfilling doctrine of life that can transcend any written record of humanity! We are the genesis, the agents of the future. The forethought of Technocracy, under the guiding directionof Howard Scott and the research of the Technical Alliance, has taken science out of the laboratory to plan for a new social order beyond anything the world has yet known. With knowledge, wisdom and dedication, under its auspices, there is hardly a limit to what the human species may creatively achieve!
It is a new system of governance, a Technate, a government of function as the next peaceful evolutionary step in America's destiny. The decision is yours to make.
(Mr. Tietz has provided us with a thorough bibliography of sources to verify his material.)