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<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/" eudora="autourl">
http://www.counterpunch.org/</a><br>
May 8, 2008<br><br>
</font><h1><font size=4><b>The Self-Righteous Rich <br><br>
<br>
</i></font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5 color="#990000">
Rockefeller Family Fables
</b></font></h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4>By SHARON
SMITH <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=6 color="#990000">O</font>
<font face="Verdana" size=2>n 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-Mobil’s longest standing shareholders. <br><br>
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. Rockefeller’s genius was in recognizing early
the need and opportunity for a transition to a better, cheaper and
cleaner fuel.”<br><br>
But the indignation of today’s generation of Rockefellerswho inherited
their own exorbitant wealth from Standard Oil, Exxon-Mobil’s parent
corporationis aimed more at ensuring the continued financial health of
the family’s trust funds than concern for the future of the world’s
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.”<br><br>
Nevertheless, the corporate media obediently described the Rockefellers
as concerned environmentalists. The <i>New York Times </i>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 family’s Rockefeller Foundation’s mission as
"promot[ing] the well-being of mankind throughout the
world.”<br><br>
The family fable concocted above warrants a rebuttal. Standard Oil was
the world’s first oil monopoly, and Rockefeller’s greed was insatiable.
Indeed, the Rockefeller family legacy is deeply entangled with the U.S.’
current reliance on oiland automobiles. Moreover, the family’s
“philanthropic” pursuits include a peculiar preoccupation with lowering
the birth rates of the world’s 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.<br><br>
</font><div align="center"><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">*
* * <br><br>
</font></div>
<font face="Verdana" size=2>Indeed, the family’s 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.
“<a href="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.</a>”<br><br>
Rockefeller’s 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.<br><br>
</font><font size=3>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.<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>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. <br>
</font><div align="center"><font size=3 color="#990000">* * * <br><br>
</font></div>
<font face="Verdana" size=2>John D. Rockefeller’s descendents have
happily carried on in the robber baron’s 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 family’s 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 family’s 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.<br><br>
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’
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil_of_California">
Standard Oil of California</a> joined
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_Corporation">General
Motors</a>,
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firestone_Tire">Firestone Tire</a>,
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil_of_California">
Standard Oil of California</a> and
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Petroleum">Phillips
Petroleum</a> to form the
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_City_Lines">National City
Lines</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holding_company">holding
company</a>, 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.<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
</font><div align="center"><font size=3 color="#990000">* * * <br><br>
</font></div>
<font face="Verdana" size=2>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. <br><br>
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 1924’s "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 <i>San Francisco
Chronicle</i> 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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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 company’s “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."<br><br>
Today’s 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.</font><font size=3> <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2><b>Sharon
Smith</b></font><font size=3> </font><font face="Verdana" size=2>is the
author of
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1931859116/counterpunchmaga">
Women and Socialism</a> and
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/193185923X/counterpunchmaga">
Subterranean Fire: a History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United
States</a>. She can be reached at:
<a href="mailto:sharon@internationalsocialist.org">
sharon@internationalsocialist.org</a> <br><br>
<br><br>
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