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By Dean Henderson | deanhenderson.wordpress

(Excerpted from Chapter 7: The Four Horsemen: Big Oil & Their Bankers…)

After World War II – during which Royal Dutch Shell Chairman Sir Henry Deterding loudly supported the Nazis, while Exxon and Texaco collaborated with the Nazi I.G. Farben combine – the Four Horsemen turned their full attention to the Middle East.

There the cartel operated under names like Iranian Consortium, Iraqi Petroleum Company and ARAMCO.

With the rise of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) as a producer cartel, the companies devised increasingly sophisticated ways to diminish OPEC’s collective bargaining ability.

Nationalistic governments were destabilized, discredited and overthrown by the CIA at the behest of Big Oil.  Henry Kissinger set up his International Energy Agency (IEA), which the French called a machine de guerre.

Both Nixon’s Twin Pillars Policy and Reagan’s Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) were efforts to divide OPEC between wealthy banker nations and poor industrializing nations, with the Saudis playing the key role of swing producer in both schemes.

As oil trader George Perk once commented of the Four Horsemen/Saudi relationship, “The oil markets are not free markets.  Oil company officials bribe officials in Saudi Arabia.  They only get into the market for a fix.”

Following the Gulf War Jordan’s King Hussein commented of the Saudi role in diminishing OPEC’s bargaining power, “At the grassroots level, long-submerged feelings of resentment on the part of most Arabs toward the Saudis are now out of the bottle.  We resent the fact that they buy everything – technology, protection, ideas, people, respectability… the Arab people are saying that the US and Saudi Arabia are indistinguishable, and from this they conclude that the Saudis are backing Israel.  Have the Saudis no shame?”

OPEC emerged from the 1973 embargo determined to craft regional solutions which would lessen its dependence on the West in obtaining hard currencies necessary to function in the global economy.  The 1972 Arab Summit in Khartoum, Sudan – which ended the first war between North and South Yemen – called on the rich Gulf State sheikdoms to divert their Western-bound petrodollars into development schemes for poor nations.

The industrializing OPEC price hawks formed the Steadfastness and Confrontation Front which consisted of Iraq, Libya, Algeria, South Yemen, the PLO and Syria.  OPEC issued The Solemn Declaration which called for a more just and equitable New International Economic Order.  This led to the Conference on International Economic Cooperation in Paris, where 19 developing countries from the G-77 met with their G-7 counterparts to discuss creating a more just global economic landscape.

OPEC leader Algeria led a political bloc at the conference called the Non-Aligned South Solidarity Movement, which advocated a trickling down of OPEC oil wealth to developing nations, instead of the recycling of petrodollars into Eight Families-owned international mega-banks. Out of this sprang the influential and pesky Non-Aligned Movement, which wanted nothing to do with picking sides between the West and the Soviet Bloc.

But Kissinger’s IEA showed up at the Paris conference demanding that it focus solely on energy, with no linkage to the larger question of global economic injustice.  The IEA was dominated by the international bankers, who preferred tallying up interest payments on bad Latin America loans financed by OPEC petrodollars to helping the world’s poor.

The bankers plowed this vast pool of money back into their Western piggy banks, financed US military expansionism and made available funds for CIA covert operations to protect their Four Horsemen and their stable of other various multinational resource extractors.

The Steadfastness and Confrontation Front met in Damascus in 1979 to plot a strategy to thwart the Camp David Peace Accords between Israel and Egypt, which the Saudis and the US were firmly backing.  The price hawks knew that Israel served Four Horsemen interests in the region. They feared further division within OPEC if this first Arab peace treaty with Israel was signed.

But the US offered Egypt massive military aid and the Accords were signed following an intensive US effort led by former Bechtel executive Philip Habib.  The Accords – coupled with Reagan’s creation of the GCC (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, Bahrain, Qatar & Oman) in 1981 – accomplished the goals of Kissinger’s machine de guerre.

The very next year the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was officially launched. Awash with recycled GCC petrodollars, the IMF both polices and legitimizes Eight Families asset seizures worldwide.

The international petroleum standard was born.

The IMF serves as enforcer and collection agency for the international bankers whom Kissinger represents. Kissinger keeps his important papers at the Rockefeller family’s vast Pocantico Hills estate in upstate New York.

(Hmm…Occupy March from NYC?)

The IMF pressures developing nations – who borrowed recycled GCC petrodollars at exorbitant 15-20% interest rates from Eight Families banks – to open their economies to multinational corporations owned by these same banks.

Bad enough they had usurped OPEC’s oil wealth – which the G-77 envisioned being utilized for Third World development. Now the bankers had the audacity to loan these petrodollars – for which GCC sheiks got 6% US T-bonds – to the South at exorbitant interest rates, plunging poor nations into a bottomless cycle of debt.

Once the nations couldn’t repay, asset seizure commenced. The 1995 Mexican “debt crisis” negotiations led by Citigroup resulted on the Rockefeller-controlled ASARCO taking control of the previously Mexican state-owned cement company and the takeover of the state-owned railroad by Burlington Northern (now BNSF).

Most of the usurious loans go to set up tax-free multinational operations or end up in the pockets of these countries’ elites, who then make off with the cash through BCCI-like Western intelligence-controlled vassals.  Workers of the Third World are then left responsible for paying back debt from money they never even received.

Former Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Perez called this IMF smoke and mirrors routine, “economic totalitarianism”.

In 2001, when the Argentine government was forced to default on $132 billion it “owed” the bankers because the IMF canceled a bailout package when Argentina refused to accept its draconian terms, the country’s Minister of Finance Domingo Cavallo called the IMF “international vampires”. [264]

Cavallo resigned, as did a succession of four Presidents who refused to play the IMF’s rigged game. Under the brave leadership of current President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the Argentines are still in arrears to the IMF.

A more recent Four Horsemen trick has been to increase oil production in non-OPEC nations.  In 1990 Exxon Mobil obtained 29% of its US-bound crude from Angola, 16% from Oman and 16% from Columbia.  RD/Shell purchased 19% of its US-bound oil from Mexico and 17% from Yemen.  Chevron Texaco got 26% of its US stock from Mexico.  None of these nations are OPEC members. [265]

A recent study by the American Petroleum Institute stated that non-OPEC production growth since 1980 has eroded OPEC market influence.  The 1984 North Sea oil discoveries by Norway and Britain further weakened the bargaining power of OPEC’s industrializing price hawks.  Norway and Britain became net exporters of crude, using that leverage to drive world oil prices lower.

The OPEC nations of Venezuela, Iraq, Indonesia and Nigeria are particularly dependent on high crude prices because oil provides a large percentage of their total exports.

In Indonesia two Presidents have been ousted since the 1999 devaluation of the rupiah thrust the world’s fourth most populous nation into an extended period of civil unrest and economic meltdown. A December 28, 1998 article in Business Week detailed Mobil’s massive oilfields and petrochemical facilities in the troubled Aceh region of North Sumatra.

Indonesian troops under the direction of President Suharto, whom the CIA installed after their 1964 John Hull-led coup, overthrew the nationalist Sukarno government and massacred protesters right next to these Mobil facilities.  It was a moment of historical continuity.  In 1882 Aceh tribesman had attacked RD/Shell headquarters in the very same region.  The Dutch colonial government put down the rebellion in similarly brutish fashion.

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