Running the World Economy in Reverse
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corporation in gross revenues. Her sisters, including Mobil, Texaco, Chevron and Gulf, were not far behind. The bulk of the OPEC dollar revenues, Kissinger’s ‘recycled petrodollars,’ was deposited with the leading banks of London and New York, the banks which dealt in dollars as well as international oil trade. Chase Manhattan, Citibank, Manufacturers Hanover, Bank of America, Barclays, Lloyds, Midland Bank—all enjoyed the windfall profits of the oil crisis. We shall later see how they recycled their petrodollars during the 1970s, and how this set the stage for the great debt crisis of the 1980s.8 TAKING THE ‘BLOOM OFF THE NUCLEAR ROSE’ One principal concern of the authors of the 400 per cent oil price increase was how to ensure that their drastic action would not drive the world to accelerate an already strong trend towards the construction of a far more efficient and ultimately less expensive alternative energy source—nuclear electricity generation. Kissinger’s former dean at Harvard, and his boss when Kissinger briefly served as a consultant to John Kennedy’s National Security Council, was McGeorge Bundy. Bundy left the White House in 1966 in order to play a critical role in shaping the domestic policy of the United States as president of the largest private foundation, the Ford Foundation. By December 1971, Bundy had established a major new project for the foundation, the Energy Policy Project, under the direction of S. David Freeman, and with an impressive $4 million checkbook and a three-year time limit. Bundy’s Ford study, titled ‘A Time to Choose: America’s Energy Future,’ was released in the midst of the debate during the 1974 oil crisis. It was to shape the public debate in the critical time of the oil crisis. For the first time in American establishment circles, the fraudulent thesis was proclaimed that ‘Energy growth and economic growth can be uncoupled; they are not Siamese twins.’ Freeman’s study advocated bizarre and demonstrably inefficient ‘alternative’ energy sources such as wind power, solar reflectors and burning recycled waste. The Ford report made a strong attack on nuclear energy, arguing that the technologies involved could theoretically be used to make nuclear bombs. ‘The fuel itself or one of the byproducts, plutonium, can be used directly or processed into the material for nuclear bombs or explosive devices,’ the report asserted.
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