The Kingdom of Oil

by Contributor | September 8, 2025 1:45 pm

In a 1917 telegram, former French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau wrote, oil is “as necessary as blood.”

The necessity of oil for the survival of Western governments, including the US, led to a unique phenomenon in history. Anthony Sampson wrote in his book “The Seven Sisters, “one of the oddest stories in contemporary history,” is “how the world’s biggest and most critical industry came to be dominated by seven giant companies.”

The corporations that dominated the oil industry were Exxon, Shell, BP, Gulf, Texaco, Mobil, and Chevron. The Seven Sisters “incomes were greater than those of most countries where they operated, their fleets of tankers had more tonnage than any navy, they owned and administered whole cities in the desert.”

Representative William J. MacDonald admitted in a Congressional Record in 1914 that Exxon was “the invisible government.” That’s when Exxon was Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. In Pithole, Pennsylvania, “The first [oil] pipeline in history was laid… and a railway extension was built, linking Pithole to Oil City and Oleopolis.”

By 1870, John D. Rockefeller “was able to establish a joint-stock company called the Standard Oil Company…. Already the company held a tenth of the oil industry in America… By 1883 he had formed the Standard Oil Trust.” Sampson wrote, “the mysterious fluid which appeared in Pennsylvania [had] become the life-blood of each industrial country, and the companies which purvey it have become the very centerpiece of the economic system.”

Antonia Juhasz wrote, “From approximately 1928 to 1973, the Seven Sisters Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, Texaco, Gulf, Shell, and BP owned the majority of the world’s oil. Operating as a cartel, they agreed upon a set price for crude that they would make available to the world’s buyers.”

In 1951, the Federal Trade Commission produced ‘The International Petroleum Cartel’ report. Sampson wrote, “The gist of the FTC findings was that the seven companies controlled all the principal oil-producing areas outside the United States… they divided the world markets between them, and shared pipelines and tankers throughout the world; and that they maintained artificially high prices for oil.”

The Attorney General wrote, “The world petroleum cartel is an authoritarian, dominating power over a great vital world industry, in private hands.” Former UK Prime Minister Lloyd George explained in March 1920, “Oil profits generally seem to find their way by some invisible pipeline into private pockets.”

In 2006, Fortune wrote, “Exxon’s return to No. 1 caps its emergence as not only the biggest but also the most powerful U.S. corporation by just about any metric… It pumps almost twice as much oil and gas a day as Kuwait, and its energy reserves stretch across six continents and are larger than those of any non-government company on the planet.”

The Forbes 2000 list for 2025 documented that ExxonMobil made more money than the GDP of 76 nations. Exxon was part of a monopoly, then a member of an international cartel, and is now one of the world’s largest corporations.

 

Anton Porcari

Source URL: https://oswegocountytoday.com/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/the-kingdom-of-oil/

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