[News] Rockefeller Family Fables
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Thu May 8 11:10:45 EDT 2008
http://www.counterpunch.org/
May 8, 2008
The Self-Righteous Rich
Rockefeller Family Fables
By SHARON SMITH
On April 30th, reporters flocked to the penthouse
suite of a Midtown Manhattan hotel where fifteen
representatives of the Rockefeller dynasty were
holding court. There, the Rockefellers chastised
oil giant Exxon-Mobil for failing to invest in
alternative energy sources, invoking their own
moral authority as Exxon-Mobils longest standing shareholders.
Family spokesperson Neva Rockefeller Goodwin
sanctimoniously recalled the memory of her
great-grandfather, John D. Rockefeller, founder
of Standard Oil and originator of the family
fortune. Kerosene was the alternative energy of
its day when he realized it could replace whale
oil, she argued. Part of John D. Rockefellers
genius was in recognizing early the need and
opportunity for a transition to a better, cheaper and cleaner fuel.
But the indignation of todays generation of
Rockefellerswho inherited their own exorbitant
wealth from Standard Oil, Exxon-Mobils parent
corporationis aimed more at ensuring the
continued financial health of the familys trust
funds than concern for the future of the worlds
population. As Peter O'Neill,
great-great-grandson of John D. Rockefeller,
commented at the press conference, I have a
world of respect for what the company has done
well. In fact, if the next 20 years of the energy
business were just going to be about oil and gas,
we probably wouldn't be here today.
Nevertheless, the corporate media obediently
described the Rockefellers as concerned
environmentalists. The New York Times ran the
headline, Can Rockefeller Heirs Turn Exxon
Greener? News outlets quoted freely from the
Rockefellers press release, which described John
D. Rockefeller as one of the first major
philanthropists in the U.S. and the World and
the familys Rockefeller Foundations mission as
"promot[ing] the well-being of mankind throughout the world.
The family fable concocted above warrants a
rebuttal. Standard Oil was the worlds first oil
monopoly, and Rockefellers greed was insatiable.
Indeed, the Rockefeller family legacy is deeply
entangled with the U.S. current reliance on
oiland automobiles. Moreover, the familys
philanthropic pursuits include a peculiar
preoccupation with lowering the birth rates of
the worlds black and brown populations
throughout the twentieth centuryhighlighting the
absurdity of their claim to be promoting the well
being of humankind. Mainstream journalists could
easily uncover these unsavory aspects of the
family history but instead report the
Rockefellers self-sanitized version, with all its glaring omissions.
* * *
Indeed, the familys selective memory of its
patriarch, John D. Rockefeller, as a saintly
philanthropist stands in sharp contrast to his
role as a nineteenth-century robber baron.
<http://thinkexist.com/quotation/god_gave_me_my_money-i_believe_the_power_to_make/295425.html>God
gave me my money, he said. Having been endowed
with the gift I possess, I believe it is my duty
to make money and still more money and to use the
money I make for the good of my fellow man
according to the dictates of my conscience.
Rockefellers conscience apparently did not
dictate paying his employees more than a
starvation wage. His admirers praise him for
making gasoline affordable to average Americans,
and he did indeed aim to produce large amounts of
"cheap and good" gasoline for mass consumption,
successfully lowering the price of gas from 58
cents to 8 cents a gallon. But he achieved this
goal through ruthless union busting, hiring his
own private militias to crush workers who dared
to go on strike to demand higher wages.
The private armies of the Rockefeller-owned
Colorado Fuel & Iron Rockefeller was a cutthroat
capitalist who built his oil monopoly in the
decades after the Civil War using methods more in
keeping with the bribery, blackmail and back
stabbing of a mafia family than an honest
entrepreneur. As he once proclaimed, "I would
rather earn 1 percent off a [sic] 100 people's
efforts than 100 percent of my own efforts. This
credo made him the richest man in the world.
As he quietly bought up his smaller oil
competitors with these methods, Rockefeller
entered into secretand illegalagreements with
railroad magnates that gave discounts as off-the
books rebates to his growing oil monopoly, easily
driving smaller refiners out of business. By
1879, Standard Oil controlled 90 percent of the
oil refining business in the U.S. When the
Supreme Court finally forced Rockefeller to
formally disband Standard Oil as a monopoly trust
in 1911, the damage was done. Indeed, the breakup
doubled the value of his stock and gave birth to
oil conglomerates Esso and Mobil (now
Exxon-Mobil), Arco and Amoco (now BP), Pennzoil
(now Shell), Chevron and Conoco. Rockefeller
spent his remaining decades playing golf.
* * *
John D. Rockefellers descendents have happily
carried on in the robber barons tradition,
alongside a public relations machine that
routinely airbrushes the family history. These
heirs have never needed to work a day in their
lives to afford the best of everything money
could buy. The Rockefeller name ensures each
generation a ten-figure trust fund and a
guaranteed spot at an elite university, enabled
by the Rockefeller familys generous donations.
The many chapels, libraries, museums and other
buildings bearing the Rockefeller name on private
campuses across the U.S. bear testament to the
familys self-serving approach to gift giving.
Most recently, David M. Rockefeller, Sr., former
chairman, president and CEO of Chase Manhattan
Bank, and former chairman of the board of the
Rockefeller Group, donated a record $100 million
to Harvard University, citing his fond memories as part of the class of 36.
By design, the Rockefellers have received no
blame for their pivotal role in destroying the
vast trolley car system that dominated U.S.
cities before the 1940s, thereby increasing city
dwellers dependency on automobiles and
gas-fueled bus lines. Yet the Rockefellers
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil_of_California>Standard
Oil of California joined
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_Corporation>General
Motors,
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firestone_Tire>Firestone
Tire,
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil_of_California>Standard
Oil of California and
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Petroleum>Phillips
Petroleum to form the
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_City_Lines>National
City Lines
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holding_company>holding
company, which bought out and dismantled more
than 100 trolley systems in 45 cities (including
New York, Detroit, Baltimore, Philadelphia, St.
Louis, Salt Lake City, Tulsa, Minneapolis and Los
Angeles) between 1936 and 1950.
In 1949, these corporate defendants were
acquitted of conspiring to monopolize
transportation services. Indeed, the corporations
behind National City Lines were each fined just
$5,000while each of their directors paid a mere
$1 finea small price to pay for the windfall in
profits they all enjoyed in the decades that
followed. Congress offered up tax dollars to
build the enormous highway infrastructure that
encouraged automobile travel in the 1950s, while
federal investment in mass transit and train
systems languished. As Noam Chomsky noted, By
the mid-1960s, one out of six business
enterprises was directly dependent on the motor vehicle industry.
* * *
No Rockefeller family history would be complete
without highlighting their central role in
shaping twentieth century population control
policy, aimed explicitly at curbing birth rates
among the non-Caucasian poor. Beginning in 1910,
Rockefeller money flowed into organizations such
as the Race Betterment Foundation and the
Eugenics Section of the American Breeders
Association, which spearheaded the eugenics
movementthe science of improving heredity.
These organizations, also funded by the
upstanding Carnegie, Harriman and Kellogg
families, sponsored academics claiming that those
at the top of the social ladder had proven their
racial superiority, while those at the bottom
were biologically incapable of success. The
eugenics movement encouraged the superior races
to marry each other and have lots of children,
while promoting forced sterilization, racial
segregation and deportation of immigrants of
those deemed unfit to reproduce.
The superior races so admired by the eugenics
movement were Nordic, with blond hair and blue
eyes, and the movement soon gained an admirer in
Adolph Hitler. In 1924s "Mein Kampf," Hitler
noted, "There is today one state in which at
least weak beginnings toward a better conception
(of immigration) are noticeable. Of course, it is
not our model German Republic, but the United
States." By the 1920s, the Rockefeller Foundation
was already providing hundreds of thousands of
dollars to fund eugenics research in Germany; in
1929 alone, $317,000 of Rockefeller money went to
the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research,
according to Edwin Black, writing in the San
Francisco Chronicle in 2003. Although the
Rockefellers had withdrawn all funding to German
research by the onset of the Second World War in
1939, Black argued, [B]y that time, the die had
been cast. The talented men Rockefeller and
Carnegie financed, the great institutions they
helped found, and the science they helped create
took on a scientific momentum of their own.
By the 1930s, the wheels for forced sterilization
were also in motion inside the U.S. Laws were
enacted in 27 states in 1932, calling for
compulsory sterilization of the feeble-minded,
insane, criminal, and physically defective. In
1939, the Birth Control Federation of America, as
historian Dorothy E. Roberts described, planned
a Negro Project designed to limit reproduction
by blacks who still breed carelessly and
disastrously, with the result that the increase
among Negroes, even more than among whites, is
from that portion of the population least
intelligent and fit, and least able to rear
children properly. In 1974, an Alabama court
found that between 100,000 and 150,000 poor black
teenagers had been sterilized in that state alone.
After World War Two, population control agencies
set their sights overseas. In the 1960s, the
International Planned Parenthood Foundation,
heavily funded by the Rockefellers alongside the
U.S. government, played a key role in a coercive
sterilization programs targeting Third World
populations. By 1968, one-third of women of
childbearing age in Puerto Ricostill a U.S.
colonyhad been permanently sterilized, often
without their knowledge or consent.
Rockefeller-funded programs sterilized 40,000
women in Colombia between 1963 and 1965,
according to feminist author Bonnie Mass. These
are just two examples among many.
The self-righteous claims of the current
generation of Rockefellers must be viewed in this
context. They have kept silent since the 1989
Exxon-Valdez Alaskan oil spill, even as
Exxon-Mobil has refused to pay court-ordered
compensation to the nearly 33,000 Alaskans who
won a lawsuit against Exxon in 1994 for the
companys reckless behavior. Nor have they
uttered a word of protest following news that
growing numbers of employed workers across the
U.S. are lining up at food pantries due to the
skyrocketing price of food and gasoline. As Bill
Bolling, founder of the Atlanta Community Food
Bank, told CNN, "People are giving up buying
groceries so that they can pay rent and put gas in the car."
Todays Rockefellers praise Exxon-Mobil for its
current status as the most profitable corporation
in U.S. history, having raked in a record $40.6
billion in profits in 2007. They are merely
watching out for their own parasitical futures.
Sharon Smith is the author of
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1931859116/counterpunchmaga>Women
and Socialism and
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/193185923X/counterpunchmaga>Subterranean
Fire: a History of Working-Class Radicalism in
the United States. She can be reached at:
<mailto:sharon at internationalsocialist.org>sharon at internationalsocialist.org
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863-9977
www.Freedomarchives.org
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