A Crude Game: Paying For Our Own Destruction by John Hoefle
The use of petroleum as a weapon by the British Empire has been a key feature of the oil business since its beginning. The original oil fields, in Pennsylvania and Texas in the United States, and in Russia, were taken over by British-allied interests, whose initial interest in oil was as fuel for a new and more powerful navy, in preparation for World War I. As the world industrialized, oil became even more important, and the control of oil assumed even greater importance for the British.
The history of oil is one of deception and manipulation, of the creation of giant cartels and front groups to hide imperial machinations. From the beginning, the vast wealth of the oligarchy, channeled through the City of London, was used to buy up the oil fields and suppress competition. Royal Dutch Shell took control of the Russian oil fields; the Anglo-Persian oil company, today known as BP, took control of fields in the Middle East; and John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil dominated the oil business in the United States. These companies, or their descendants, still control the world's oil markets. There is no such thing as a "free market" in oil, and there never has been.
There are, today, three layers of control over oil. The first is OPEC, the organization of major oil-producing countries, which was a creation by the British, the purpose of which is both to set a floor under the price, and to provide a convenient scapegoat. Th
