-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Sept. 19, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------

Big Oil is behind it all

By Vince Copeland

[The following is excerpted from an article first published in the November/December 1990 issue of Liberation & Marxism magazine. The writer was a founding member of Workers World Party and the first editor of Workers World newspaper. He wrote this during Operation Desert Shield just before the U.S.-led war against Iraq began. Some personalities and corporate standings may have changed, but the basic elements remain.]

How can the oil companies, which are only a part of U.S. capitalism, have so much power that they can get the president's ear, intimidate Congress and call the shots on foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East?

In the first place, the big oil companies have the most concentrated amount of capital. They can use it to get their people into the government and tell other people what to do.

In the top 20 of Fortune's Top 500 industrial corporations, there are three auto companies, two chemical, one food and tobacco, one soap, one film and camera, one aircraft, one business machines, one utilities and electric appliances, one steel, one general defense contractor-and seven oil companies.

There are several invisible oil companies in the list, too. The huge Gulf Oil company has been absorbed by Chevron, formerly Standard of California-Socal. Texaco bought Getty. Marathon was bought by U.S. Steel, now USX, and Continental (Conoco) by Dupont, which already had heavy influence with Phillips Petroleum.

The connection between auto companies and oil needs no elaboration, except to say that their interests may diverge at times, although not fundamentally.

Most of these oil companies get at least half their oil from abroad. Furthermore, their foreign holdings are far above the foreign wealth of other U.S. companies. Consequently they are in foreign affairs up to their necks- and they have a marked influence on foreign policy.

Rockefellers' protégé

Probably the most famous secretary of state in recent memory was Henry Kissinger, who was well known to be a Rockefeller agent. The Rockefellers sponsored and groomed him from the time he received his doctorate at Harvard.

He was the prize pupil of the Ford-Carnegie-Rockefeller-sponsored Council on Foreign Relations, coming up with the best blueprint for war as early as 1957: his book "Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy."

The Rockefellers, of course, are big in other industries besides oil. They have had a director on the board of Chrysler Motors for decades. They share power with the Morgans in USX, AT&T and several of the Bell telephone spin-offs as well.

And although they sold Rockefeller Center to Japanese interests, they still have tremendous real estate holdings in New York and other cities.

Although they own or control many industrial corporations as well, the Rockefellers' basic wealth is in Exxon. The company has 33 refineries in 23 countries, and subsidiaries and affiliates in 59 countries.

The Rockefellers also have interests in some other oil companies. They string out their control in a wider spread by using the power of their Chase Manhattan Bank, often called the "oil bank."

Chase Manhattan, in turn, can name U.S. Cabinet members more readily than the average individual oil company. But the power comes from the wealth of oil.

In general, the big banks, rather than the individual oil companies, provide the biggest officials of government.

James A. Baker III, Bush's secretary of state, was elected by nobody but Bush himself. He can browbeat the whole Senate Foreign Relations Committee, elected by the citizens of several states and containing some very wealthy people besides. This is because he represents the very biggest banks and is invested with the executive power.

Baker comes from an even richer family than Bush, with directorships in the biggest Texas (oil) banks.

Carter's secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, representing some outposts of the Morgan banking empire, held back from a showdown in the Gulf over the hostages in Iran. And when the military took charge and planned the helicopter rescue adventure without his knowledge, he resigned.

The Morgans are deep in oil, too. They have a bigger stake in the Mobil Co., for instance, than the Rockefellers. And they have some influence in Texaco. But they also have other interests-like other banks.

They are big in General Motors and USX, which are both inconvenienced by the present high price of oil. On the other hand, USX recently bought Marathon Oil for several billion dollars and thus has a direct interest in the ongoing oil war in the Middle East.

Cyrus Vance, of course, did not merely reflect all these changing interests in one personality-important as personality sometimes may be. Like most of the Morgan stable of politicians, he represented one or another political faction of the Morgan empire.

Reagan's first secretary of state, Alexander Haig, a retired general, had been a $500,000-a-year president of a Morgan-dominated defense-contracting company, United Technologies. And he was considerably to the right of Vance.

It is sometimes hard to say where the CIA ends and the oil companies' activities begin. When Theodore Roosevelt's grandson Kermit led the CIA overturn of the Mossadegh government in Iran and restored the shah to the Peacock Throne in 1953, he was supposed to be working for the U.S. government. But he was made a vice president of Gulf Oil, which made tens of millions of dollars from the action, shortly afterward.

The government itself is from the very heart of big business. And if, to the big banks, you add the military-industrial complex as such-which is intimately connected to the oil industry along with auto, chemicals, steel and the banks-and sprinkle the whole thing with oil from beginning to end, you have a reasonable working model of the imperialist war-making government of the United States today.

- END -

(Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if source is cited. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail: ww@wwpublish.com. For subscription info send message to: ww-info@wwpublish.com. Web: http://www.workers.org)

Copyright © 1996 workers.org