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William Engdahl heeft een boek gepubliceerd met de titel ‘A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order’ uit dit boek heeft hij een hoofdstuk genomen waarin hij onder andere beschrijft wie er verantwoordelijk was voor de Yom Kippoer oorlog (voorbereid door de VS en Groot-Brittannië), de daarna en daaraan gelinkte oliecrisis, het loslaten van de goudstandaard voor de dollar, het ontstaan van de petrodollar, andere smerige handelingen van Nixon en Kissinger, de macht van de Bilderbergconferenties, plus het verzet tegen kernenergie.
Wat betreft de laatste, dus verzet tegen kernenergie is het duidelijk dat Engdahl dat verzet onzin vindt. Het verzet tegen deze vorm van energie zou vooral ontstaan zijn bij de directies van een aantal oliemaatschappijen, die bovendien een flink aantal regeringen in hun zak hadden (en hebben) en zouden daardoor aan de wieg van de anti-kernenergielobby hebben gestaan. Uiteraard kan je je daar van alles bij voorstellen, immers met de vooruitzichten in de 50er en 60er jaren dat kernenergie een wondermiddel was voor elektriciteitsopwekking, zou daarmee tegelijkertijd een fiks deel van de winsten te niet worden gedaan, de enorme winsten die de oliemaffia maakte.
Echter daar valt nog wel het één en ander op aan te merken, zeker als je ziet dat de jeugd, de studenten en de arbeiders in de 60er en 70er jaren zich niet meer zo makkelijk als schapen lieten leiden door de oudere generaties en ‘het wettig gezag’. Het verzet tegen de atoombom is daarna gelinkt aan het verzet tegen kernenergie. Bovendien zag men destijds dat ongelukken met kerncentrales zoals het eerste grote ongeluk in een kerncentrale, die in de centrale van Windscale (later vanwege dat ongeluk omgedoopt tot: Sellafield) onder het tapijt werden geschoven. Voorts zag men niet alleen dat kernenergie werd misbruikt om kernwapens van te maken, maar ook dat door de productie van kernenergie het gebruikte water voor koeling in open wateren werd geloosd, waarbij organisaties als Greenpeace bij de punten waar dit in zee of rivieren terechtkomt teveel radioactiviteit meten, voorts vonden en vinden er dan nog ‘kleine ongelukjes’ plaats waarbij de centrales radioactief stoom ventileren op de buitenlucht….. Niet vreemd dan ook dat in de omgeving van kerncentrales (niet zelden) een sterk verhoogd aantal kankers was en is te vinden onder omwonenden…..
Ook de grote hoeveelheden radioactiviteit, die grotere ongelukken in het milieu terechtkwamen, verontrustten velen en dat volkomen terecht….. Zie wat dat betreft ook de leugen dat de 1,3 miljoen ton radioactief besmet water, die men in het Japanse Fukushima in de oceaan wil lozen geen gevaar vormt voor mens en milieu (1,3 miljoen ton >> daarvoor moet je achter de 5 nullen van die 1,3 miljoen ton nog eens 3 nullen plakken, immers een ton is 1.000 liter of 1.000 kilo, ofwel het gaat hier om 1.300.000.000 liter radioactief besmet water, in spreektaal: 1,3 miljard liter……). Ik zal hier later nog een bericht over brengen, waarin door deskundigen duidelijk wordt gemaakt dat ook het water dat men daar wil lozen een gevaar vormt voor mens, zeeleven en de rest van het milieu.
Intussen heeft de kernenergie-industrie een machtige lobby gevormd, niet alleen van degenen die deze manier van energie opwekken zaligmakend vinden, maar bijvoorbeeld ook van bedrijven die bij de bouw worden betrokken, zo heeft de bouwmaffia er alle belang bij dat er bijvoorbeeld in Nederland nieuwe kerncentrales worden gebouwd….. Alleen al het feit dat verzekeringsmaatschappijen kerncentrales niet willen verzekeren zou voor een ieder het teken moeten zijn om te stoppen met deze frankensteinwetenschap….. Niet voor niets dat men het aantal ernstige ziekten na een ongeval met een kerncentrale voor het overgrote deel uit de media houdt >> niets mag de wil tot het bouwen van kerncentrales in de weg staan…..
Het afbreken van kerncentrales is nog een heel stuk kostbaarder dan de bouw daarvan, vandaar ook dat men deze ondingen liever laat staan. Om de veiligheid van mensen te kunnen garanderen zou men veilige en bewaakte opslag van kernafval en de gebouwen van kerncentrales honderden zo niet duizenden jaren moeten kunnen garanderen en dat is totaal onmogelijk zoals je zal begrijpen, dus stop met de bouw van deze ondingen en het gebruik daarvan…..
Dat men in Nederland weer kerncentrales wil bouwen geeft ten overvloede aan dat de politiek schijt heeft aan de gezondheid van de burgers, niet voor niets ook dat de kabinetten Rutte zo enorm hebben bezuinigd op de gezondheidszorg dan wel dat hebben toegestaan aan de misdadige zorgverzekeraars die al heel wat ziekenhuizen hebben laten sluiten, vanwege een gebrek aan winstmaken….. (waarbij men zegt dat het sluiten van ziekenhuizen efficiëntie in de hand zal werken…. ha! ha! ha! de oplichters!!) Hoe heeft men ooit durven opperen dat de gezondheidszorg winst moet opleveren, dat moeten wel speciale inhumane, neoliberale psychopathische ploerten zijn geweest!!
Bij de totaal onverantwoorde bezuinigingen op de gezondheidszorg is een fiks aantal partijen betrokken geweest van de PVV tot de PvdA en alles daartussen in. Wat niet wil zeggen dat de PvdA een links partij is, het is een neoliberale partij die zelfs in de oppositie voor meer dan 94% meestemt met de wetsvoorstellen en akkoord gaat met andere zaken van het zittende kabinet. Het zal me niet verbazen als PvdA/GroenLinks, mocht deze coalitie werkelijk een kabinet kunnen vormen na de volgende verkiezingen aanstaande november, niet zal tornen aan de bouw van de kerncentrales. Vergeet niet dat EU grofgraaier en PvdA leugenaar Timmermans jarenlang heeft samengewerkt met zijn partijcollega en oplichter Samsom, die nog vlak voor de ramp met de kerncentrale van Fukushima stelde dat hij achter kernenergieopwekking stond, om dat onmiddellijk in te trekken nadat die ramp een feit was…..
Wat mij vooral opviel in het hieronder weergegeven artikel van Engdahl is de rol van de Bilderbergconferenties, volgens aartsleugenaar Rutte, godbetert ‘onze premier’, zijn deze samenkomsten niets anders zijn dan praatclubjes, echter Engdahl bewijst wat mij betreft dat deze club van schoften grote invloed hebben in de westerse maatschappijen en dat men daar de ‘politieke koers’ uitzet voor de toekomstige jaren, zoals de wens om de wereldbevolking fiks uit te dunnen…. (al wisten velen van ons dat allang) Logisch ook, zoals ik al vaker aangaf op deze plek: als deze Bilderbergconferenties alleen maar praatclubjes vormen >> waarom mag er dan niet worden geopenbaard over wat er wordt besproken??
‘Journalisten’ die mogen deelnemen aan de Bilderbergconferenties moeten alvorens toegang te krijgen beloven dat ze er niets over zullen publiceren dan wel zeggen >> deze zogenaamde journalisten moeten zich de oren van de kop en de ogen uit diezelfde kop schamen…..
Ach ja, het overgrote deel van de journalisten die werken voor de reguliere westerse (massa-) media is intussen gecorrumpeerd en deze figuren hebben dan ook niets meer te maken met objectieve en onafhankelijke berichtgeving, wat zover gaat dat men vanuit die beroepsgroep de gelauwerde onderzoeksjournalist Julian Assange heeft gedemoniseerd en dat in veel gevallen nog doet….. Het demoniseren van NB hun collega Julian die gvd al meer dan 4,5 jaar in isolatiefolter zit voor het openbaren van de waarheid >> het publiceren van vreselijke oorlogsmisdaden begaan door het terreurleger van de VS…… Dezelfde VS die nu het Internationaal Strafhof (International Criminal Court >> ICC) onder druk zet om Putin en anderen in Rusland te vervolgen voor…. oorlogsmisdaden!!! Volgens zeggen zouden bovendien veel journalisten in de VS werken voor de CIA en de NSA…. (het is wel zeker dat dit ook in andere westerse landen een feit is)
Gezien de berichtgeving in de reguliere westerse media over de oorlog van de NAVO onder leiding van de VS tegen Rusland, een oorlog die in Oekraïne wordt uitgevochten, kan je niet anders dan de conclusie trekken dat die media in de zak zitten van de geheime diensten, de politieke lobbyisten van de VS en de NAVO (wat betreft Nederland zijn dat de figuren uit de regering en ons parlement), de wapenfabrikanten en de rechtse denktanks, zoals die in Nederland >> HCSS en Clingendael, als ik me niet vergis beiden gefinancierd met ons belastinggeld….. (HCSS >> Den Haag Centrum voor Strategische Studies [ha! ha! de naam is al een leugen], in het Engels >> The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies)
Overigens hebben diezelfde media al vanaf de eerste oorlog van de VS tegen Irak laten zien dat ze niets meer met onafhankelijke journalistiek te maken hebben, vandaar ook dat ze al jaren hebben geschreeuwd om censuur op de sociale media, daar men op die plek nog wel onafhankelijke journalistiek kan vinden…… Dezelfde media waar men de reguliere media de les leest over hun afhankelijke berichtgeving, zo zijn deze media ofwel staatsmedia, dan wel media die worden bekostigd door grote reclamemakers als Albert Heijn en waarbij het overgrote deel van de niet-staatsmedia in het bezit zijn van plutocraten die bijvoorbeeld belang hebben bij oorlog vanwege hun aandelenportefeuilles in de wapenindustrie, of wat dat je van aandelenportefeuilles in de farmaceutische maffia >> zie wat dat betreft de volkomen eenzijdige berichtgeving in die media ten tijde van de Coronacrisis (overigens men blijft in die media hameren op de veiligheid van vaccins en over de doeltreffendheid van de PCR-test en de flutthuistesten, terwijl zowel de vaccins als de testen (en de mondmaskers) al op zoveel manieren onderuit zijn gehaald, maar ja de winsten voor die plutocraten over de aandelen farmacie waren dan ook overweldigend……)
Lees het artikel van Engdahl en als over mijn schrijven: vorm je eigen mening!!
(als
je het Engels niet machtig bent, zet dan de tekst om in Nederlands
met behulp van Google translate dat je rechts bovenaan deze pagina
ziet staan,eerst
door in het menu op Engels te klikken, waarna je weer kan klikken op
die vertaalapp, waarna je dan bovenaan in het menu Nederlands ziet
staan, klik daarop en de hele tekst staat in het Nederlands, de
vertaling is van een redelijk goede kwaliteit.)
Saudi Arabia and the Hidden Petrodollar Origins
F. William Engdahl info@williamengdahl.com via aweber.com
Hello Dear Readers,
Recently the world’s
largest oil producer, Saudi Arabia, along with UAE, joined BRICS, a
group of nations increasingly at odds with a heavy-handed US foreign
policy. The true significance of the move cannot be appreciated
without knowing the actual background of how in the early 1970’s
Washington coerced Saudi Arabia and OPEC to sell their oil to the
world for dollars and dollars only. That is now beginning to change
and the consequences are huge for the world geopolitical and economic
configuration.
The following selection
from my international bestselling book, A
Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order,
goes into the largely hidden history of the 1973 oil shock and the
behind-the-scenes actions of Washington and Wall Street to secure the
dollar with world trade in oil. From 1971 to 1975 Washington went
from a gold-backed dollar system to essentially a petroleum-backed
dollar, the so-called petrodollar. It was all done via control of
Saudi Arabia and OPEC oil sales in dollars only. It was ingenious,
and enormously destructive to world economic development.
If you haven’t yet done
so, please also consider support for my online voice. The relentless
censorship of the Internet and social media by the private corporate
social media companies since the 2020 covid fake pandemic, and now
the war in Ukraine, is alarming and damaging and can only be compared
with book burnings in the Germany of the 1930s, or the Medieval
Inquisitions with torture of heretics.
I thank you again for
your interest and support,
William
Engdahl
www.williamengdahl.com
Reader Reviews
of A Century
of War:
★★★★★
“Shocking – read
this to learn how the world really operates” –
Utah Blaine
★★★★★
“This book will change
the way you view the world” –
Guy Denutte
★★★★★
“ MUST
READ” –
g-the-amateur
★★★★★
“Full spectrum research
!“
– Rev4u
★★★★★
“Read this book!“
– Charles Guiliani
★★★★★
“A must read for long
term investors“
– Ahmed M. Alrayes
★★★★★
“A treasure house of
Geo-Political information.“
– R. King
©
F. William Engdahl CHAPTER NINE:
Running
the world economy in reverse: Who made the 1970’s oil shocks?
Nixon pulls the plug
By
the end of President Richard Nixon’s first year in office, 1969, the
U.S. economy had again gone into recession. In order to combat the
downturn, U.S. interest rates by 1970 were sharply lowered. As a
consequence of the falling interest rates, speculative ‘hot money’
began once more to leave the dollar in record amounts, seeking higher
short-term profit in Europe and elsewhere.
One
result of by now almost decade-long American refusal to devalue the
dollar, and her reluctance to take serious action to control the huge
unregulated Eurodollar market, was an increasingly unstable
short-term currency speculation. As most of the world’s bankers well
knew, King Canute could pretend to hold the waves back for only so
long.
As
a result of Nixon’s expansionary domestic U.S. monetary policy in
1970, the capital inflows of the previous year reversed, and the U.S.
incurred a net capital outflow of $6.5 billions. But, as U.S.
recession persisted, as interest rates continued to drop into 1971,
and money supply to expand, these outflows reached then-huge
dimensions, totaling $20 billions. Then, in May of 1971, the United
States recorded its first monthly trade deficit as well, triggering a
virtual international panic sell-off of the U.S. dollar. The
situation was indeed becoming desperate.
By
1971 U.S. official gold reserves represented less than one quarter of
her official liabilities, meaning that theoretically if all foreign
dollar holders demanded gold instead, Washington would have been
unable to comply without drastic measures. 1
The
Wall Street establishment had persuaded President Nixon to abandon
fruitless efforts to hold the dollar against a flood of international
demand to redeem for gold. But, unfortunately, they did not want the
required dollar devaluation against gold which had been intensely
sought for almost a decade.
On
August 15, 1971 Nixon took the advice of a close circle of key
advisers which included his chief Budget adviser, George Shultz, and
a policy group then at the Treasury Department including Paul
Volcker, and Jack F. Bennett, who later went on to become a director
of Exxon. That sunny quiet August day, in a move which rocked the
world, the President of the United States announced formal suspension
of dollar convertibility into gold, effectively putting the world
fully onto a dollar standard with no gold backing, and by this,
unilaterally ripping apart the central provision of the 1944 Bretton
Woods system. No longer could foreign holders of U.S. dollars redeem
their paper for U.S. gold reserves.
Nixon’s
unilateral action was reaffirmed in protracted international talks
that December in Washington, between the leading European
governments, Japan and a few others, which resulted in a bad
compromise known as the Smithsonian Agreement. With an exaggeration
which exceeded even that of his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, Nixon
announced after the Smithsonian talks, that they were, ‘the
conclusion of the most significant monetary agreement in the history
of the world.’ The U.S. had formally devalued the dollar a mere 8
percent against gold, placing gold at $38/fine ounce instead of the
long-standing $35, hardly the 100 percent devaluation being asked by
allied countries. The agreement also officially permitted a band of
currency value fluctuation of 2.25 percent instead of the original 1
percent of the IMF Bretton Woods rules.
By
declaring to world dollar holders their paper would no longer be
redeemed for gold, Nixon ‘pulled the plug’ on the world economy,
setting into motion a series of events which was to rock the world as
never before. Within weeks, confidence in the Smithsonian agreement
had begun to collapse.
De
Gaulle’s defiance of Washington in April 1968 on the issue of gold
and adhering to the rules of Bretton Woods, had not been sufficient
to force through the badly needed reordering of the international
monetary system, but it had sufficiently poisoned the well of
Washington’s ill-conceived IMF Special Drawing Rights scheme to cover
over the problems of the dollar.
The
suspension of gold redemption and the resulting international
‘floating exchange rates’ of the early 1970’s solved nothing. It
only bought some time.
An
eminently workable solution would have been for the U.S. to set the
dollar to a more realistic level. From France, de Gaulle’s former
economic adviser, Jacques Rueff, continued to plead for a $70/oz.
gold price, instead of the $35 level the U.S. unsuccessfully
defended. This would calm world speculation and allow the U.S. to
redeem her destabilizing Eurodollars balances abroad, without
plunging the domestic U.S. economy into any severe chaos, Rueff
argued. If done right, it could have given a tremendous spur to U.S.
industry as its exports would cost less in foreign currency. American
industrial interests would again have predominated over financial
voices in U.S. policy circles. But reason was not to prevail.
The
Wall Street rationale was that the power of their financial domain
must be untouched, even if at expense of economic production or
American national prosperity.
Gold
itself has little intrinsic value. It has certain industrial uses.
But historically, because of its scarcity, it has served as a
standard of value against which different nations have fixed the
terms of their trade and therefore their currencies. When Nixon
decided no longer to honor U.S. currency obligations in gold, he
opened the floodgates to a worldwide Las Vegas speculation binge of a
dimension never before experienced in history. Instead of calibrating
long-term economic affairs to fixed standards of exchange, after
August 1971 world trade was simply another arena of speculation on
which direction various currencies would fluctuate.
The
real architects of the Nixon strategy were in the influential City of
London merchant banks. Sir Siegmund Warburg, Edmond de Rothschild,
Jocelyn Hambro and others, saw a golden opportunity in Nixon’s
dissolution of the Bretton Woods gold standard the summer of 1971.
London was once again to become a major center of world finance, and
again on ‘borrowed money,’ this time with American Eurodollars.
After
August 1971, dominant U.S. policy, under White House National
Security Adviser, Henry A. Kissinger, was to control, not to develop,
economies throughout the world. U.S. policy officials began proudly
calling themselves ‘neo-Malthusians.’ Population reduction in
developing nations, rather than technology transfer and industrial
growth strategies, began to be the dominating priority during the
1970s, yet another throwback to nineteenth-century British colonial
thinking. How this transformation took place we shall soon see.
The
ineffective basis of the Smithsonian Agreement led to further
deterioration into 1972, as massive capital flows again left the
dollar for Japan and Europe, until February 12, 1973 when Nixon
finally announced a second devaluation of the dollar, of 10 percent
against gold, pricing gold where it remains to this day for the
Federal Reserve, at $42.22/ounce.
At
this point all the major world currencies began a process of what was
called the ‘managed float.’ Between February and March of 1973,
the value of the U.S. dollar against the German Deutschmark dropped
another 40 percent. Permanent instability had been introduced into
world monetary affairs in a way not seen since the early 1930’s. But
this time strategists in New York, Washington and the City of London
were preparing an unexpected surprise to regain the upper hand and
recover from the devastating loss of the monetary pillar of their
system.
An unusual meeting in
Saltsjoebaden
The
design behind Nixon’s August 15, 1971 dollar strategy did not emerge
until October 1973, more than two years later, and even then, few
persons outside a handful of insiders grasped the connection. The
August 1971 de-monetization of the dollar was used by the London-New
York financial establishment to buy precious time, while policy
insiders prepared a bold new monetarist design, a ‘paradigm shift’
as some preferred to term it. Certain influential voices in the
Anglo-American financial establishment had devised a strategy to
create again a strong dollar, and once again to increase their
relative political power in the world, just when it appeared they
were in decisive rout.
In
May 1973, with the dramatic fall of the dollar still vivid, a group
of 84 of the world’s top financial and political insiders met at the
secluded island resort of the Swedish Wallenberg banking family, at
Saltsjoebaden, Sweden. This gathering of Prince Bernhard’s Bilderberg
Group, heard an American participant outline a ‘scenario’ for an
imminent 400 percent increase in OPEC petroleum revenues. The purpose
of the secret Saltsjoebaden meeting was not to prevent the expected
oil price shock, but rather, plan how to manage the
about-to-be-created flood of oil dollars, a process U.S. Secretary of
State Kissinger later called ‘recycling the petro-dollar flows.’
The
American speaker to the Bilderberg on “Atlantic-Japanese Energy
Policy” was clear enough. After stating the prospect that future
world oil needs would be supplied by a small number of Middle East
producing countries, the speaker declared, prophetically: ‘The cost
of these oil imports would rise tremendously, with difficult
implications for the balance of payments of consuming countries.
Serious problems would be caused by unprecedented foreign exchange
accumulations of countries such as Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi.’ The
speaker added, ‘A complete change was underway in the political,
strategic and power relationships between the oil producing,
importing and home countries of international oil companies and
national oil companies of producing and importing countries.’ He
then projected an OPEC Middle East oil revenue rise, which would
translate into just over 400 percent, the same level Kissinger was
soon to demand of the Shah.
Present
at Saltsjoebaden that May were Robert O. Anderson of Atlantic
Richfield Oil Co.; Lord Greenhill, chairman of British Petroleum; Sir
Eric Roll of S.G. Warburg, creator of Eurobonds; George Ball of
Lehman Brothers investment bank, and the man who some ten years
earlier as Assistant Secretary of State, told his banker friend
Siegmund Warburg to develop London’s Eurodollar market; David
Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan Bank; Zbigniew Brzezinski, the man
soon to be President Carter’s National Security Adviser; Italy’s
Gianni Agnelli and Germany’s Otto Wolff von Amerongen among others.
Henry Kissinger had been a regular participant at the Bilderberg
gatherings. 2
The
Bilderberg annual meetings were first begun, in utmost secrecy, in
May, 1954 by an anglophile group which included George Ball, David
Rockefeller, Dr. Joseph Retinger, Holland’s Prince Bernhard, George
C. McGhee (then of the U.S. State Department and later a senior
executive of Mobil Oil). Named for the place of their first
gathering, the Hotel de Bilderberg near Arnheim, the annual
Bilderberg meetings gathered top elites of Europe and America for
secret deliberations and policy discussion. Consensus was then
‘shaped’ in subsequent press comments and media coverage, but
never with reference to the secret Bilderberg talks themselves. This
Bilderberg process has been one of the most effective vehicles of
postwar Anglo-American policy-shaping.
What
the powerful men grouped around Bilderberg had evidently decided that
May, was to launch a colossal assault against industrial growth in
the world, in order to tilt the balance of power back to the
advantage of Anglo-American financial interests, and the dollar. In
order to do this, they determined to use their most prized
weapon–control of the world’s oil flows. Bilderberg policy was to
trigger a global oil embargo, in order to force a dramatic increase
in world oil prices. Since 1945, world oil trade had by international
custom been priced in dollars as American oil companies dominated the
postwar market. A sharp sudden increase in the world price of oil,
therefore, meant an equally dramatic increase in world demand for
U.S. dollars to pay for that necessary oil.
Never
in history had such a small circle of interests, centered in London
and New York, controlled so much of the entire world’s economic
destiny. The Anglo-American financial establishment had resolved to
use their oil power in a manner no one could imagine possible. The
very outrageousness of their scheme was to their advantage, they
clearly reckoned.
Kissinger’s Yom Kippur
oil shock
On
October 6, 1973, Egypt and Syria invaded Israel, igniting what became
known as the ‘Yom Kippur’ war. Contrary to popular impression,
the ‘Yom Kippur’ war was not the simple result of miscalculation,
blunder or an Arab decision to launch a military strike against the
state of Israel. The entire events surrounding outbreak of the
October war were secretly orchestrated by Washington and London,
using the powerful diplomatic secret channels developed by Nixon’s
White House National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger.
Kissinger
effectively controlled the Israeli policy response through his
intimate relation with Israel’s Washington ambassador, Simcha Dinitz.
As well, Kissinger cultivated channels to the Egyptian and Syrian
side. His method was simply to misrepresent to each party the
critical elements of the other, ensuring the war and its subsequent
Arab oil embargo.
U.S.
intelligence reports including intercepted communications from Arab
officials confirming the buildup for war, were firmly suppressed by
Kissinger, who was by then Nixon’s intelligence ‘czar.’ The war
and its aftermath, Kissinger’s infamous ‘shuttle diplomacy,’ were
scripted in Washington, along the precise lines of the Bilderberg
deliberations of the previous May in Saltsjoebaden, some six months
before outbreak of the war. Arab oil-producing nations were to be the
scapegoat for the coming rage of the world, while the Anglo-American
interests responsible, stood quietly in the background. 3
In
mid-October 1973 the German Government of Chancellor Willy Brandt
told the U.S. Ambassador to Bonn that Germany was neutral in the
Middle East conflict, and would not permit the U.S. to resupply
Israel from German military bases. With an ominous foreboding of
similar exchanges which would occur some 17 years later, on October
30, 1973 Nixon sent Chancellor Brandt a sharply worded protest note,
most probably drafted by Kissinger:
‘We recognize
that the Europeans are more dependent upon Arab oil than we, but we
disagree that your vulnerability is decreased by disassociating
yourselves from us on a matter of this importance…You note that
this crisis was not a case of common responsibility for the Alliance,
and that military supplies for Israel were for purposes which are not
part of alliance responsibility. I do not believe we can draw such a
fine line…’ 4
Washington
would not permit Germany to declare its neutrality in the Mideast
conflict. But, significantly, Britain was allowed to clearly state
its neutrality, thus avoiding the impact of the Arab oil embargo.
Once again London had maneuvered itself skillfully around an
international crisis it had been instrumental in precipitating.
One
enormous consequence of the ensuing 400 percent rise in OPEC oil
prices was that investments of hundreds of millions of dollars by
British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell and other Anglo-American
petroleum concerns in the risky North Sea could produce oil at a
profit. It is a curious fact of the time that the profitability of
these new North Sea oil fields was not at all secure until after
Kissinger’s oil shock. Of course, this could have only been a
fortuitous coincidence. Or was it?
By
October 16, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries,
following a meeting on oil price in Vienna, had raised their price by
a then-staggering 70 percent, from $3.01/barrel to $5.11. That same
day, the members of the Arab OPEC countries, citing the U.S. support
for Israel in the Mideast war, declared an embargo on all oil sales
to the United States and Netherlands–the major oil port of Western
Europe.
Saudi
Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Libya, Abu Dhabi, Qatar and Algeria announced
on October 17, 1973 that they would cut their production below the
September level by 5 percent for October and an additional 5 percent
per month, ‘until Israeli withdrawal is completed from the whole
Arab territories occupied in June 1967 and the legal rights of the
Palestinian people are restored.’ The world’s first ‘oil shock,’
or as the Japanese termed it, ‘Oil Shokku’ was underway.
Significantly,
the oil crisis hit full force just as the President of the United
States was becoming personally embroiled in what came to be called
the ‘Watergate affair,’ leaving Henry Kissinger as de facto
President, running U.S. policy during the crisis in late 1973.
When
the Nixon White House sent a senior official to the U.S. Treasury in
1974 order to devise a strategy to force OPEC into lowering the oil
price, he was bluntly turned away. In a memo the official stated, ‘It
was the banking leaders who swept aside this advice and pressed for a
‘recycling’ program to accommodate to higher oil prices. This was
the fatal decision…’
The
U.S. Treasury, under Secretary Jack Bennett, the man who helped steer
Nixon’s fateful August 1971 dollar policy, had established a secret
accord with the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency, SAMA, an agreement
finalized in a February 1975 memo from U.S. Assistant Treasury
Secretary Jack F. Bennett to Secretary of State Kissinger. Under the
terms of the agreement, the huge new Saudi oil revenue windfall was
to be invested in significant sums into financing the U.S. government
deficits. A young Wall Street investment banker with the leading
Eurobond firm of White Weld & Co. based in London, by the name of
David Mulford, was sent to Saudi Arabia to become the principal
‘investment adviser’ to SAMA, to guide the Saudi petrodollar
investments to the correct banks, naturally in London and New York.
The Bilderberg scheme was operating fully as planned. 5
Kissinger,
already firmly in control of all U.S. intelligence estimates as
Nixon’s all-powerful National Security Adviser, secured control of
U.S. foreign policy as well, persuading Nixon to name him Secretary
of State in the weeks just prior to outbreak of the October Yom
Kippur war. Kissinger, symptomatic of his central role in events,
retained both titles as head of the White House National Security
Council and as Secretary of State, something no individual had done
before or after him. No other single person during the last months of
the Nixon presidency wielded as much absolute power as did Henry
Kissinger. To add insult to injury, Kissinger was given the 1973
Nobel Peace Prize.
Following
a meeting in Teheran on January 1, 1974, yet a second price increase
of more than 100 percent more was added, bringing OPEC benchmark oil
prices to $11.65. This was done on the surprising demand by the Shah
of Iran, who had been secretly told to do so by Henry Kissinger.
The
Shah had only months earlier opposed the OPEC increase to $3.01 for
fear this would force Western exporters to charge more for the
industrial equipment the Shah sought to import for Iran’s ambitious
industrialization. Washington and Western support for Israel in the
October war had fed OPEC anger at the meetings. And Kissinger’s own
State Department had not even been informed of Kissinger’s secret
machinations with the Shah. 6
From
1949 until the end of 1970, Middle East crude oil prices had averaged
approximately $1.90/barrel. They had risen to $3.01 in early 1973,
the time of the fateful Saltsjoebaden meeting of the Bilderberg group
which discussed an imminent 400 percent future rise in OPEC’s price.
By January 1974 that 400 percent increase was fait accompli.
The economic impact of
the oil shock
The
social impact of the oil embargo on the United States in late 1973
could be described as panic. All throughout 1972 and early 1973, the
large multinational oil companies, led by Exxon, had pursued a
curious policy of creating short domestic supply of crude oil,
allowed to do so under a series of odd decisions made by President
Nixon on advice of his aides. When the embargo then hit in November
1973, therefore, the impact could not have been more dramatic. At the
time, the White House was responsible for control of U.S. oil imports
under provisions of a 1959 U.S. Trade Agreements Act.
In
January 1973, Nixon had appointed then-Treasury Secretary George
Shultz to be the Assistant to the President for Economic Affairs as
well. Shultz oversaw White House oil import policy in this post. His
Deputy Treasury Secretary, William E. Simon, a former Wall Street
bond trader, was made chairman of the important Oil Policy Committee
which determined U.S. oil import supply in the critical months
leading up to the October embargo.
In
February 1973, Nixon was persuaded to set up a special ‘energy
triumvirate’ which included Shultz, White House aide John
Ehrlichman, and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, to be
known as the White House Special Energy Committee. The scene was
quietly being set for the Bilderberg plan, though almost no one in
Washington or elsewhere realized the fact. Domestic U.S. stocks of
crude oil by October 1973, were already at alarmingly low levels. The
OPEC embargo triggered a gasoline buying panic among the public,
calls for rationing, endless gas lines and a sharp economic
recession. 7
The
most severe impact of the oil crisis hit the United States’ largest
city, New York. In December 1974, nine of the world’s most powerful
bankers, led by David Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan, Citibank, and
the London-New York investment bank, Lazard Freres, told the Mayor of
New York, an old-line machine politician named Abraham Beame, that
unless he turned over control of the city’s huge pension funds to a
committee of the banks, called the Municipal Assistance Corporation,
the banks and their influential friends in the media would ensure
financial ruin to the city. Not surprisingly, the overpowered Mayor
capitulated, New York City was forced to slash spending for roadways,
bridges, hospitals and schools in order to service their bank debt,
and to lay off tens of thousands of city workers. The nation’s
greatest city was turned into a scrap heap beginning then. Felix
Rohatyn, of Lazard Freres, became head of the new bankers’ collection
agency, dubbed by the press as ‘Big MAC.’
In
Western Europe the shock of the oil price rise and the embargo on
supplies was equally dramatic. From Britain to the Continent, country
after country felt the effects of the worst economic crisis since the
1930’s. Bankruptcies and unemployment rose to alarming levels across
Europe.
Germany’s
government imposed an emergency ban on Sunday driving, in a desperate
effort to save imported oil costs. By June 1974 the oil crisis
effects had contributed to the dramatic collapse of Germany’s
Herstatt-Bank and a crisis in the D-mark as a result. As Germany’s
imported oil costs increased by a staggering 17 billion D-marks in
1974, with half a million people reckoned to be unemployed because of
the oil shock and its effects, inflation levels reached an alarming 8
percent. The shock effects of a sudden 400 percent increase in the
price of Germany’s basic energy feedstock were devastating to
industry, transport, and agriculture. Keystone industries such as
steel, shipbuilding, and chemicals all went into a deep crisis at
this time as a result of the oil shock.
Willy
Brandt’s government was effectively defeated by the domestic impact
of the oil crisis, as much as by the Stasi affair revelations
against his close adviser, Guenther Guillaume. By May 1974 Brandt had
offered his resignation to Bundespresident Heinemann, who then
appointed Helmut Schmidt Chancellor. Most governments across Europe
fell in this period, victim to the consequences of the oil shock on
their economies.
But
the economic impact on the developing economies of the world–for at
this time they still could be rightly called developing, rather than
the fatalistic Third World designation so in vogue today–the impact
of an overnight price increase of 400 percent in their primary energy
source was staggering. The vast majority of the world’s
less-developed economies, without significant domestic oil resources,
were suddenly confronted with an unexpected and unpayable 400 percent
increase in costs of energy imports, to say nothing of costs
chemicals and fertilizers for agriculture derived from petroleum.
During this time, commentators began speaking of ‘triage,’ the
wartime idea of survival of the fittest, and introduced the
vocabulary of ‘Third World’ and ‘Fourth World’ (the non-OPEC
countries).
India
in 1973 had a positive balance of trade, a healthy situation for a
developing economy. By 1974, India had total foreign exchange
reserves of $629 millions with which to pay–in dollars–an annual
oil import bill of almost double that or $1,241 million. Sudan,
Pakistan, Philippines, Thailand and throughout Africa and Latin
America country after country was faced in 1974 with gaping deficits
in their balance of payments. As a whole, developing countries in
1974 incurred a total trade deficit of $35 billions according to the
IMF, a colossal sum in that day, and, not surprisingly, a deficit
precisely 4 times as large as in 1973, or just in proportion to the
oil price increase.
Following
the several years of strong industrial and trade growth of the early
1970’s, the severe drop in industrial activity throughout the world
economy in 1974-75 was greater than any such decline since the war.
But
while Kissinger’s 1973 oil shock had a devastating impact on world
industrial growth, it had an enormous benefit for certain established
interests–the major New York and London banks, and the Seven Sister
oil multinationals of the U.S. and Britain. Exxon replaced General
Motors as the largest American corporation in gross revenues by 1974.
Her sisters were not far behind, including Mobil, Texaco, Chevron and
Gulf.
The
bulk of OPEC dollar revenues, Kissinger’s ‘recycled petrodollars,’
was deposited with the leading banks of London and New York, the
banks which dealt in dollars as well as international oil trade.
Chase Manhattan, Citibank, Manufacturers Hanover, Bank of America,
Barclays, Lloyds, Midland Bank, all enjoyed the windfall profits of
the oil shock. We shall later see how they recycled their
‘petro-dollars’ during the 1970’s, and how it set the stage for
the great debt crisis of the 1980’s. 8
Taking the bloom off the
‘nuclear rose’
One
principal concern of the authors of the 400 percent oil price
increase, was how to ensure their drastic action did not drive the
world to accelerate an already strong trend towards construction of a
far more efficient and ultimately less expensive alternative energy
source–nuclear electricity generation.
Kissinger’s
former dean at Harvard and his boss when Kissinger briefly served as
a consultant to John Kennedy’s National Security Council was McGeorge
Bundy. Bundy left the White House in 1966 in order to play a critical
role in shaping the domestic policy of the United States as president
of the largest private foundation, the Ford Foundation. By December
1971 Bundy had established a major new project for the foundation,
the Energy Policy Project under direction of S. David Freeman, with
an impressive $4 million checkbook, and a three year time limit.
Precisely in the midst of debate during the 1974 oil shock, Bundy’s
Ford study, titled, ‘A Time to Choose: America’s Energy Future,’
was released, in order to shape the public debate in the critical
time of the oil crisis.
For
the first time in American establishment circles the fraudulent
thesis was proclaimed that, ‘Energy growth and economic growth can
be uncoupled; they are not Siamese twins.’ Freeman’s study
advocated bizarre and demonstrably inefficient ‘alternative’
energy sources such as windpower, solar reflectors and burning
recycled waste. The Ford report made a strong attack on nuclear
energy, arguing that the technologies involved could theoretically be
used to make nuclear bombs. ‘The fuel itself or one of the
byproducts, plutonium, can be used directly or processed into the
material for nuclear bombs or explosive devices,’ they asserted.
The
Ford study correctly noted that the principal competitor to the
hegemony of petroleum in the future was nuclear energy, warning
against the ‘very rapidity with which nuclear power is spreading in
all parts of the world and by development of new nuclear
technologies, most notably the fast breeder reactors and the
centrifuge method of enriching uranium.’ The framework of the U.S.
financial establishment’s anti-nuclear ‘green’ assault had been
defined by Bundy’s project. 9
By
the early 1970’s nuclear technology had clearly established itself as
the preferred future choice for efficient electric generation, vastly
more efficient (and environmentally friendly) than either oil or
coal. At the time of the oil shock, the European Community was
already well into a major nuclear development program. Plans of
member governments as of 1975 called for completion of between 160
and 200 new nuclear plants across Continental Europe by 1985.
In
1975, the Schmidt government in Germany, reacting rationally to the
implications of the 1974 oil shock, passed a program which called for
an added 42 GigaWatts of German nuclear plant capacity, for a total
of approximately 45 percent of German total electricity demand by
1985, a program exceeded in the EC only by France’s, which projected
45 GigaWatts new nuclear capacity by 1985. Italy’s Industry Minister
Carlo Donat Cattin in the fall of 1975, instructed Italy’s nuclear
companies, ENEL and CNEN to draw up plans for construction of some 20
nuclear plants for completion by the early 1980’s. Even Spain, just
then emerging from four decades of Franco rule, had a program calling
for construction of 20 nuclear plants by 1983. A typical 1 GigaWatt
nuclear facility is generally sufficient to supply all electricity
requirements for a modern industrial city of one million people.
The
rapidly growing nuclear industries of Europe, especially France and
Germany, were beginning for the first time to emerge as competent
rivals to American domination of the nuclear export market by the
time of the 1974 oil shock. France had secured a Letter of Intent
from the Shah of Iran, as had Germany’s KWU, to build a total of four
nuclear reactors in Iran, while France had signed with Pakistan’s
Bhutto government to create a modern nuclear infrastructure in that
country. Negotiations also reached a successful conclusion in
February 1976, between the German government and Brazil, for
cooperation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy which included
German construction of eight nuclear reactors as well as facilities
for reprocessing and enrichment of Uranium reactor fuel. German and
French nuclear companies, with full support of their governments,
entered in this period into negotiations with select developing
sector countries, fully in the spirit of Eisenhower’s 1953 Atoms for
Peace declaration.
Clearly,
the Anglo-American energy grip, based on their tight control of the
world’s major energy source, petroleum, was threatened if these quite
feasible programs went ahead.
Nuclear
energy represented in the postwar period precisely the same quality
of higher technological level, which oil had been over coal when Lord
Fisher and Winston Churchill argued at the end of the last century
for Britain’s navy to convert to oil from coal. The major difference
was that Britain and her cousins in the United States in the 1970’s,
held the grip on world oil supplies. World nuclear technology
threatened to open unbounded energy possibilities, especially if
plans for commercial nuclear fast breeders were realized, as well as
thermonuclear fusion.
In
the immediate wake of the 1974 oil shock, two industry organizations
were established, both based significantly enough in London. In early
1975 an informal semi-secret group was established, the Nuclear
Suppliers Group, or ‘London Club’ as it was known. The group included
Britain, the US, Canada together with France, Germany, Japan and the
USSR. It was an initial Anglo-American effort to secure
self-restraint on nuclear export. It was complemented in May 1975 by
formation of another secretive organization which grouped the world’s
major suppliers of nuclear uranium fuel, the London ‘Uranium
Institute,’ dominated by traditional British regions including
Canada, Australia, South Africa and the UK. These ‘inside’
organizations were necessary but by no means sufficient for the
Anglo-American interests to contain the nuclear ‘threat’ in the
early 1970’s.
As
one prominent anti-nuclear American from the Aspen Institute put
their problem, ‘We must take the bloom off the ‘nuclear rose.’‘
And take it off they did.
Developing the
Anglo-American green agenda
It
was not exactly accidental that a growing part of the population in
Western Europe, especially in Germany, following the oil shock
recession of 1974-5, began talking for the first time in the postwar
period about ‘limits to growth,’ or threats to the environment,
and began to question their faith in the principle of industrial
growth and technological progress. Very few people realized the
extent to which their new ‘opinions’ were being carefully
manipulated from the top by a network established by the same
Anglo-American finance and industry circles behind the Saltsjoebaden
oil shock strategy.
Beginning
the 1970’s an awesome propaganda offensive was launched from select
Anglo-American think-tanks and journals, intended to shape a new
‘limits to growth’ agenda, which would insure the ‘success’
of the dramatic oil shock strategy. The American oilman present at
the May 1973 Saltsjoebaden meeting of the Bilderberg group, Robert O.
Anderson, was a central figure in the implementation of the ensuing
Anglo-American ecology agenda. It was to become one of the most
successful frauds in history.
Anderson
and his Atlantic Richfield Oil Co. funneled millions of dollars
through their Atlantic Richfield Foundation into select organizations
to target nuclear energy. One of the prime beneficiaries of
Anderson’s largesse was a group called Friends of the Earth, which
was organized in this time with a $200,000 grant from Anderson. One
of the earliest targets of Anderson’s Friends of the Earth was to
finance an assault on the German nuclear industry, through such
anti-nuclear actions as the anti-Brockdorf demonstrations in 1976,
led by Friends of the Earth leader Holger Strohm. Friends of the
Earth French director was the Paris partner of the Rockefeller family
law firm, Coudert Brothers, one Brice LaLonde, who in 1989 became
Mitterrand’s Environment Minister. It was Friends of the Earth which
was used to block a major Japan-Australia uranium supply agreement.
In November 1974 Japanese Prime Minister Tanaka came to Canberra to
meet Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. The two made a
commitment potentially worth billions of dollars, for Australia to
supply Japan’s needs for future uranium ore and enter a joint project
to develop uranium enrichment technology. British uranium mining
giant, Rio Tinto Zinc, secretly deployed Friends of the Earth in
Australia to mobilize opposition to the pending Japanese agreement,
resulting some months later in the fall of Whitlam’s government.
Friends of the Earth had ‘friends’ in very high places in London
and Washington.
But
Robert O. Anderson’s major vehicle to spread the new ‘limits to
growth’ ideology among American and European establishment circles,
was his Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies. With Anderson as
Chairman, and Atlantic Richfield head Thornton Bradshaw as
vice-chairman, the Aspen Institute was a major financial conduit in
the early 1970’s for creation of the establishment’s new anti-nuclear
agenda.
Among
the better-known trustees of Aspen at this time were World Bank
President and the man who ran the Vietnam war, Robert S. McNamara.
Lord Bullock of Oxford University and Richard Gardner, an anglophile
American economist who later was U.S. Ambassador to Italy, and Wall
Street banker, Russell Peterson of Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb Inc.,
were among the carefully selected trustees of Aspen at this time, as
were EXXON board member Jack G. Clarke, Gulf Oil’s Jerry McAfee,
Mobil Oil director George C. McGhee, the former State Department
official who was present in 1954 at the founding meeting of the
Bilderberg group. Involved with Anderson’s Aspen as well from this
early period, was Hamburg’s Die Zeit publisher Marion Countess
Doenhoff, as well as former Chase Manhattan Bank chairman and High
Commissioner to Germany, John J. McCloy.
Robert
O. Anderson brought in Joseph Slater from McGeorge Bundy’s Ford
Foundation to serve as Aspen’s president. It was indeed a close-knit
family in the Anglo-American establishment of the early 1970’s. The
initial project Slater launched at Aspen was the preparation of an
international organizational offensive against industrial growth and
especially nuclear energy, using the auspices (and the money) of the
United Nations. Slater secured support of Sweden’s UN Ambassador
Sverker Aastrom, who steered through the UN a proposal, over
strenuous objections from developing countries, for an international
conference on the environment.
From
the outset, the June 1972 Stockholm United Nations’ Conference on the
Environment was run by operatives of Anderson’s Aspen Institute.
Aspen board member, Maurice Strong, a Canadian oilman from
Petro-Canada, chaired the Stockholm conference. Aspen as well
provided financing to create under UN auspices, an international
zero-growth network called the International Institute for
Environment and Development, whose board included Robert O. Anderson,
Robert McNamara, Strong and British Labour Party’s Roy Jenkins. The
new organization immediately produced a book, ‘Only One Earth,’
by Rockefeller University associate Rene Dubos and British malthusian
Barbara Ward (Lady Jackson). The International Chambers of Commerce
were persuaded at this time as well to sponsor Maurice Strong and
other Aspen figures in seminars targeting international businessmen
on the emerging new environmentalist ideology.
The
Stockholm 1972 conference created the necessary international
organizational and publicity infrastructure such that by the time of
the Kissinger oil shock of 1973-4, a massive anti-nuclear propaganda
offensive could be launched, with the added assistance of millions of
dollars readily available from oil-linked channels of the Atlantic
Richfield Company, the Rockefeller Brothers’ Fund and other such
elite Anglo-American establishment circles. Among the groups which
were funded by these people in this time were organizations including
the ultra-elitist World Wildlife Fund whose chairman was the
Bilderberg’s Prince Bernhard, and later Royal Dutch Shell’s John
Loudon. (10).
Indicative
of this financial establishment’s overwhelming influence in the
American and British media, is the fact that during this period, no
public outcry was launched to investigate the probable conflict of
interest involved in Robert O. Anderson’s well-financed anti-nuclear
offensive, and the fact that his Atlantic Richfield Oil Co. was one
of the major beneficiaries from the 1974 price increase of oil.
Anderson’s ARCO had invested tens millions of dollars into high-risk
oil infrastructure in Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay and Britain’s North Sea,
together with Exxon, British Petroleum, Shell and the other Seven
Sisters.
Had
the 1974 oil shock not raised the market price of oil to
$11.65/barrel or thereabouts, Anderson’s, as well as British
Petroleum and Exxon and the others’ investments in the North Sea and
Alaska would have brought financial ruin. To ensure a friendly press
voice in Britain, Anderson at this time purchased ownership of the
London Observer. Virtually no one asked if Anderson and his
influential friends might have known in advance that Kissinger would
create the conditions for a 400 percent oil price rise. 11
Not
to leave any zero growth stone unturned, Robert O. Anderson also
contributed significant funds to a project initiated by the
Rockefeller family at the Rockefeller’s estate at Bellagio, Italy
with Aurelio Peccei and Alexander King. This Club of Rome, and the
U.S. Association of the Club of Rome, in 1972 gave widespread
publicity to their publication of a scientifically fraudulent
computer simulation prepared by Dennis Meadows and Jay Forrester,
titled, ‘Limits to Growth.’ Adding modern computer graphics to
the discredited essay of Malthus, Meadows and Forrester insisted that
the world would soon perish for lack of adequate energy, food and
other resources. As did Malthus, they chose to ignore the impact of
technological progress on improving the human condition. Their
message was one of unmitigated gloom and cultural pessimism.
One
of the most targeted countries for this new Anglo-American
anti-nuclear offensive in this time was Germany. While France’s
nuclear program was equally if not more ambitious, Germany was deemed
an area where Anglo-American intelligence assets had greater
likelihood of success given their history in the postwar occupation
of the Federal Republic. Almost as soon as the ink had dried on the
Schmidt government’s 1975 nuclear development program, an offensive
was launched.
A
key operative in this new project was to be was a young woman whose
mother was German and stepfather American and who had lived in the
U.S. until 1970, working for U.S. Senator Hubert Humphrey, among
other things. Petra K. Kelly had developed close ties in her U.S.
years to one of the principal new Anglo-American anti-nuclear
organizations created by McGeorge Bundy’s Ford Foundation, the
Natural Resources Defense Council. The Natural resources Defense
Council included Barbara Ward (Lady Jackson) and Laurance Rockefeller
among its board at the time. In Germany, Kelly began organizing legal
assaults against construction of the German nuclear program during
the mid-1970’s, resulting in costly delays and eventual large cuts in
the entire German nuclear plan.
Population control
becomes US ‘national security’
In
1798 an obscure English clergyman, professor of political economy in
the employ of the British East India Company’s East India College at
Haileybury, was given instant fame by his English sponsors for his
‘Essay on the Principle of Population.’ The essay itself was a
scientific fraud, plagiarized largely from a Venetian attack on the
positive population theory of American Benjamin Franklin.
The
Venetian attack on Franklin’s essay had been written by Giammaria
Ortes in 1774. Malthus’ adaptation of Ortes’ ‘theory’ was refined
with a facade of mathematical legitimacy which he called the ‘law
of geometric progression,’ which held that human populations
invariably expanded geometrically, while the means of subsistence
were arithmetically limited or linear. The flaw in Malthus’ argument,
as demonstrated irrefutably by the spectacular growth of
civilization, technology and agriculture productivity since 1798, was
Malthus’ deliberate ignoring of the contribution of advances in
science and technology to dramatically improve such factors as crop
yields, labor productivity and such. 12
By
the mid-1970’s, indicative of the effectiveness of the new propaganda
onslaught from the Anglo-American establishment, American government
officials were openly boasting in public press conferences that they
were committed ‘neo-Malthusians,’ something for which they would
have been laughed out of office a mere decade or so earlier. But
nowhere did the new embrace of British malthusian economics in the
United States show itself more brutally than in Kissinger’s National
Security Council.
On
April 24, 1974, in the midst of the oil crisis, White House National
Security adviser, Henry Alfred Kissinger, issued a National Security
Council Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200), on the subject of
‘Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and
Overseas Interests.’ It was directed to all cabinet secretaries,
the military Joint Chiefs of Staff as well as the CIA and other key
agencies. On October 16, 1975, on Kissinger’s urging, President
Gerald Ford issued a memorandum confirming the need for ‘U.S.
leadership in world population matters,’ based on the contents of
the classified NSSM 200 document. The document made malthusianism,
for the first time in American history, an explicit item of security
policy of the government of the United States. More bitter the irony,
was the fact that it was initiated by a German-born Jew. Even during
the Nazi years government officials in Germany were more guarded
about officially espousing such goals.
NSSM
200 argued that population expansion in select developing countries
which also contain key strategic resources necessary to the U.S.
economy, posed potential U.S. ‘national security threats.’ The
study warned that under pressure from an expanding domestic
population, countries with needed raw materials will tend to demand
better prices and higher terms of trade for their exports to the
United States. In this context, the NSSM 200 identified a target list
of 13 countries singled out as ‘strategic targets’ for U.S.
efforts at population control. The list, drawn up in 1974, no doubt,
as with all other major decisions of Kissinger, also involving close
consultation with the British Foreign Office, is instructive.
Kissinger
explicitly stated in the memorandum, ‘how much more efficient
expenditures for population control might be than (would be funds
for) raising production through direct investments in additional
irrigation and power projects and factories.’ British 19th century
Imperialism could have expressed it no better. By the middle 1970’s
the government of the United States, with this secret policy
declaration, had committed itself to an agenda which would contribute
to its own economic demise as well as untold famine, misery and
unnecessary death throughout the developing sector. The 13 target
countries named by Kissinger’s study were Brazil, Pakistan, India,
Bangladesh, Egypt, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand,
Turkey, Ethiopia and Colombia. 13
Footnotes:
(1)
Argy, Victor. ‘The Postwar International Money Crisis.’ George
Allen & Unwin. London, 1981.
(2)
‘Saltsjoebaden Conference.’ Bilderberg meetings, 11-13 May, 1973.
The author obtained an original copy of the official discussion from
this meeting. Normally confidential, the document was bought in a
Paris used bookstore, apparently coming from the library of a member.
In a September, 2000 private conversation, H.E. Sheikh Yaki Yamani
told the author about his conversation with the Shah of Iran in early
1974. When Yamani, on instructions from the Saudi King, asked the
Shah why Iran demanded such a large OPEC price increase, the Shah
replied, ‘For the answer to your question, I suggest you go to
Washington and ask Henry Kissinger.’ The agenda for the 1973
Bilderberg meeting was prepared by Robert Murphy, the man who in 1922
as U.S. Consul in Munich, first met Adolf Hitler and sent back
favorable recommendations to his superiors in Washington. Murphy
later shaped U.S. policy in postwar Germany as Political Adviser.
Walter Levy, who delivered the Saltsjoebaden energy report, was
intimately tied to the fortunes of big oil. In 1948 as oil economist
for the Marshall Plan Economic Co-operation Administration, Levy had
tried to block a government inquiry into charges the oil companies
were overcharging.
(3)
Golan, Matti. ‘The Secret Conversations of Henry Kissinger:
Step-by-step diplomacy in the Middle East.’ New York. Bantam Books
Inc., 1976.
(4)
Kissinger, Henry A. ‘Years of Upheaval.’ Little, Brown & Co.,
Boston, 1982.
(5)
Memorandum reproduced in ‘International Currency Review.’ Vol.
20, # 6. January 1991. London. p. 45.
(6)
Akins, James. Private conversations regarding his tenure as Director
of Fuels & Energy Office of U.S. State Department at that time,
later Ambassador to Saudi Arabia.
(7)
Goodwin, Craufurd D., et al. ‘Energy Policy in Perspective.’
Washington D.C., The Brookings Institution, 1981.
(8)
For a revealing view of the intimate inter-relation of Kissinger and
the British Foreign Office during the entire period of the early
1970’s oil shock, it is useful to cite a section from a remarkably
frank address given by Kissinger on May 10, 1982 before the Royal
Institute of International Affairs in London. Following several
minutes of effusive praise for the two centuries of skillful British
‘balance of power’ diplomacy, Kissinger then approvingly cites
the postwar U.S.-British ‘special relationship,’ adding, ‘Our
postwar diplomatic history is littered with Anglo-American
‘arrangements’ and ‘understandings,’ sometimes on crucial issues,
never put into formal documents…The British were so
matter-of-factly helpful that they became a participant in internal
American deliberations, to a degree probably never before practiced
between sovereign nations. In my period in office, the British played
seminal role in certain American bilateral negotiations…In my White
House incarnation then, I kept the British Foreign Office better
informed and more closely engaged than I did the American State
Department…’ Kissinger then cites as example, his U.S.
negotiations over the future of Rhodesia: ‘In my negotiations over
Rhodesia, I worked from a British draft with British spelling even
when I did not fully grasp the distinction between a working paper
and a Cabinet-approved document. The practice of collaboration
thrives to our day…’ — Kissinger, Henry A. ‘Reflections
on a Partnership: British and American Attitudes to Postwar Foreign
Policy.’ Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House,
London. May 10, 1982.
(9)
Ford Foundation Energy Policy Project. ‘A Time to choose: America’s
Energy Future.’ Ballinger Publishing Co. Cambridge Massachusetts.
1974.
(10)
In June 1973, on the personal initiative of Chase Manhattan Bank
chairman David Rockefeller, an influential new international
organization, largely built on the foundation of the Bilderberg
group, was established. It was called the Trilateral Commission, and
its first executive director was Bilderberg attendee Zbigniew
Brzezinski. The Trilateral Commission attempted for the first time in
postwar Anglo-American history to draw Japanese finance and business
elites into the Anglo-American policy consensus formation. In 1976
Henry Kissinger changes places with Brzezinski as Trilateral director
while Brzezinski assumed Kissinger’s job as National Security Adviser
to the new President Jimmy Carter, himself a member of the
semi-secret Trilateral Commission group as were many of his key
cabinet secretaries.
(11)
The background for this part is the result of extensive interview and
corporate industry research by the author over a more than 16-year
period.
(12)
For a critique of Malthus’ economics, see List, Friedrich, ‘The
National System of Political Economy,’ Augustus M. Kelley reprint,
New Jersey. 1977
(13)
National Security Study Memorandum 200. ‘Implications of Worldwide
Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests.’ U.S.
National Archives. December 10, 1974.
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