Journey

In fact, it’s most likely that one of the reasons for the Vietnam War was to get the French out of there and get our businesses in there because, more than tungsten, it’s the oil. There are enormous oil mines that have already been located off the coast of Vietnam, so the assets of Vietnam were what we would gain from the war, and our companies are moving in there now and taking over.

You mentioned speaking of oil, you mentioned in one of your last talks that petroleum wasn’t what we thought it was, that it wasn’t a fossil fuel, but it didn’t come from fossil animals. Yeah, is it just a mineral? Is it a mineral like any other mineral? Is that how it is? Uh, what would you say? What’s the origin of it?

Yes, when they first discovered petroleum… because they were beginning to make motors and needed axles or wheels for railroad trains and all that sort of thing (and remember, trains began in the early nineteenth century), oil went from just a lubricant to a fuel, which made it valuable.

Rockefeller happened to be the smartest man in the business at the time, but he made most of his money—or much of it—off the transport of the petroleum, as well as selling it.

But one thing they realized was that putting a price on oil is like putting a price on a pail of water. You know, there’s no initial cost; it’s in the ground, and in those days, they were almost doing what you’d call surface mining—the oil didn’t go down very deep.

So, in order to get the price up, they hit on the idea that they would have to make it appear to be scarce. “Boy, after we take the next few barrels out, we’re probably going to have to close the well.” You know, that kind of thing.

But a very fortuitous event occurred in 1892—there was a convention in Geneva of scientists to determine “what organic substances are.” Well, the definition of “organic” is “a substance with hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon.” So it’s usually a living substance, like a tree. You analyze a dead tree: hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, grass, and so on. Animals, living things: we are hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon.

So, at the Geneva convention, Rockefeller took advantage of sending some scientists over, who said, “Oil is hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon.” Therefore, it must be derived from the spoiling and rotting of formerly living matter. and playing the game properly, when this scientific convention was over, they defined oil as “the residue of formerly living matter.” Well, that makes it a fossil fuel.

I don’t know why they decided to use the word “fossil,” but it says “formerly living matter is fossil.”

Well of course today, and another thing we should know is that there has never been a fossil of a real fossil found below sixteen thousand feet, and you can’t argue with sixteen thousand as a level line because the ground sinks and so on, but sixteen thousand is what the scientists say.

We mine oil or we we drill for oil, at thirty thousand, every day of the week, so right there we rule out that it isn’t fossil fuel.

It is called fossil fuel to make the public believe that it is a limited resource that is being depleted—an asset that is “running out.” We talk about “depletion allowance,” which is a lot of “you know” (laughs), and actually, if you know the world’s oil supply, you know that it isn’t going to run out for an awfully long time; it is the second most prevalent liquid on earth, and we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface.

With all that background, you see the people in charge of the petroleum business for perfectly reasonable business uh things like any other man in the business, wants to keep his price as high as he can get away with, and the way to do is just say well “there’s no more, the last barrel is going to cost a thousand dollars and it’s all done.” They preach that stuff.

What bothers me is that, in geology books, it’s in there–the geologists say it’s a fossil fuel; somehow they’ve been bought?

I mean, I went to a four-year “Federal Staff Energy Seminar” run by the government of the United States during the so-called “energy crisis”. I was the participant who represented the railroad industry. The airline industry was present, as were every AAA administrative assistant of Senators and Congressmen, the CIA, the defense department, and the State Department.

Sometimes, sitting right in front of me, would be Henry Kissinger with his friend, the head of the Department of Defense; uh, I can’t remember the names—anyway, people like that. Top men in the government were sitting there listening to the Federal Staff Energy Seminar.

Well, what they were doing was teaching a propaganda line to the leaders of this country, and thus the leaders of the world, for four years. Including Kissinger and Shlesinger, among others.

And the goal was, as Kissinger put it when it was his turn to speak, “to create a world price for oil.”

In other words, not 30 cents a gallon here and 90 cents a gallon there, but let’s get a world price that’s their gold, and they’re trying to do that for wheat and everything else; we don’t realize what the controls are, whether it’s oil or some other things.

Almost everything today is being categorized at the highest price they can possibly make it go, and so calling petroleum or fossil fuel the basis for this system with respect to petroleum.

I don’t know if the name “Arthur Kantrowitz” rings any bells, but Kantrowitz is the head of the Kantrowitz scientific laboratories set up by the AFCO company near Boston. A great man in the scientific world.

Kantrowitz and I were sitting at a table at this seminar once, and the table happened to be all young college grad PhD geologists, and so just to get a conversation started, I turned to Kantrowitz and I said, “Arthur, what do you think about this foolishness of these speakers talking about fossil fuel?”

He started laughing, and he said, “You know, that gets me.” He said, “I don’t have a geology degree,” (but he had a thousand other degrees) and he said, “I don’t understand- you’d think these heads and these other fellows at the table. We did it on purpose. He said to those at the table “Are you gentlemen by any chance, geologists?” One follower said “yes, I am”. He said, “Well, why don’t you tell me? … So, why is oil..” and he went on like that. We brought the house down because nobody could argue with Kantrowitz – he was like Einstein!

It’s in all the books and all the papers, but it started from that strange meeting in 1892. A scientific convention in Geneva. I have a big thick scientific encyclopaedia put out by the divan Austrian company that’s about oh 15 years old now, but it has the whole story of the conference.

It doesn’t have the Rockefeller part, but it has the whole story of how they straightened out organic chemicals and how it’s all figured out, and they’ve got petroleum right in there, so these aren’t accidental things. You see, “there’s a dollar sign behind almost everything.”

Fletcher Prouty