Seldes describes the plotters as "the great owners and rulers of America who planned world domination through political and military Fascism"
including "several leading American industrialists, members of the Congress of the United States, and representatives of large business and political organizations . . ."
He obtained the text of the agreement, and published it in his newsletter, "In Fact," on July 13, 1942. The plan "goes much further than the mere cartel conspiracies of Big Business of both countries,"
writes Seldes, "because it has political clauses and points to a bigger conspiracy of money and politicians such as helped betray Norway and France and other lands to the Nazi machine. The most powerful fortress in America is the production monopolies, but its betrayal would involve, as it did in France, the participation of some of the most powerful figures of the political as well as the industrial world." (11)
STANDARD OIL OF NEW JERSEY (Now Exxon)
"On February 27, 1942," according to Higham, "Arnold, with documents stuffed under his arms, . . . strode into the lion's den of Standard at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Just behind him were Secretary of the Navy Franklin Knox and Secretary of the Army Henry L. Stimson." They confronted Standard official William Farish and "Arnold sharply laid down his charges" that "by continuing to favor Hitler in rubber deal and patent arrangements," Standard Oil "had acted against the interests of the American government . . .
suggested a fine of $1.5 million and a consent decree whereby Standard would turn over for the duration all the patents" in question.
"Farish rejected the proposal on the spot. He pointed out that Standard" was also selling the U.S. a "high percentage" of the fuel being used by the Army, Navy, and Air Force "making it possible for America to win the war. Where would America be without it?"
Blackmail? Yes, says Higham. And effective. Arnold was finally reduced to asking the oil company official "to what Standard Oil would agree.
After all, there had to be at least token punishment. . . . Arnold, Stimson, and Knox soon realized they had no power to compare with that of Standard."
The price Standard Oil "agreed" to pay for its crime? A modest fine of a few thousand dollars divided up among ten defendants. "Farish paid $1,000, or a quarter of one week's salary, for having betrayed America."
In New Jersey, charges of "criminal conspiracy with the enemy" were filed against Standard, then "dropped in return for Standard releasing its patents and paying the modest fine." But Arnold, and his ally, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, weren't finished with Standard Oil just yet. They approached Senator Truman, chairman of the Senate Special Committee Investigating the National Defense Program. "With great enthusiasm Give 'em Hell Harry embarked on a series of hearings in March 1942, in order to disclose the truth about Standard."
Between the 26th and the 28th of March, 1942, Arnold "produced documents showing that Standard and Farben in Germany had literally carved up the world markets, with oil and chemical monopolies all over the map,"
according to Higham. (12)
Mintz and Cohen describe the confrontation:
"Four months after the United States entered World War II, the Justice Department obtained an indictment of Exxon and its principal officers for having made arrangements, starting in the late 1920s with I.G. Farben involving patent sharing and division of world markets. Jersey Standard agreed not to develop processes for the manufacture of synthetic rubber; in exchange, Farben agreed not to compete in the American petroleum market. After war broke out in Europe, but before the attack on Pearl Harbor, executives of Standard Oil and Farben, at a meeting in Holland, established a 'modus vivendi' for continuing the arrangements in event of war between the United States and Germany - although the arrangements interfered with the ability of the United States to make synthetic rubber desperately needed after it entered the war in December 1941. Rather than face a criminal trial, Exxon and the indicted executives entered no-contest pleas - the legal equivalent of guilty pleas - and were fined the minor sums which were the maximum amounts permitted by law. A few days later, on March 26, 1942, the Senate Special Committee Investigating the National Defense Program held a hearing at which Thurman Arnold, chief of the Antitrust Division, put into the record documents on which the [criminal]
indictment had been based, including a memo from a Standard Oil official on the 'modus vivendi' agreed to in Holland. After the hearing, the committee chairman, Harry S. Truman, characterized the arrangements as treasonable." (13)
Another source book on this subject of US / Nazi corporate activities is "The Secret War Against the Jews," by Mark Aarons and John Loftus. Here is their version of the events:
"Before the war Standard of New Jersey had forged a synthetic oil and rubber cartel with the Nazi-controlled I.G. Farben," which "worked well until the United States joined the war in 1941. . .
Next to the Rockefellers, I.G. Farben owned the largest share of stock in Standard Oil of New Jersey. Among other things, Standard had provided Farben with its synthetic rubber patents and technical knowledge, while Farben had kept its patents to itself, under strict instructions from the Nazi government."
Evidence which Thurman Arnold turned over to the Truman Committee, which Truman would declare "treasonous," included "Standard's 1939 letter renewing its agreement, which made it clear that the Rockefellers'
company was prepared to work with the Nazis whether their own government was at war with the Third Reich or not. Truman's Senate Committee on the National Defense was outraged and began to probe into the whole scandalous arrangement, much to the discomfort of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Suddenly, however, the whole matter was dropped.
"There was a reason for Rockefeller's escape: blackmail. According to the former intelligence officers we interviewed on this point, the blackmail was simple and powerful: The Dulles brothers [John Foster, later Secretary of State, and Allen, later director of the CIA] had one of their clients threaten to interrupt the U.S. oil supply during wartime."
When confronted by Arnold on the Standard - Farben arrangement "Standard executives made it clear that the entire U.S. war effort was fueled by their oil and it could be stopped. . . . The American government had no choice but to go along if it wanted to win the war." (14)
July 13, 1944, Ralph W. Gallagher, attorney for Standard Oil, filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government's seizure of the contested patents.
"On November 7, 1945, Judge Charles E. Wyzanski gave his verdict,"
according to Higham. "He decided that the government had been entitled to seize the patents. Gallagher appealed. On September 22, 1947, Judge Charles Clark delivered the final word on the subject. He said, 'Standard Oil can be considered an enemy national in view of its relationships with I.G. Farben after the United States and Germany had become active enemies.' The appeal was denied." (15)
One aspect of this Standard - I.G. Farben relationship, revealed in testimony during the Patents Committee hearings, chaired by Senator Homer T. Bone in May 1942, is of interest to those who seek direct evidence of a conspiracy by big oil companies to suppress development of synthetic substitutes to petrochemical products such as industrial chemicals, aircraft lubricants and fuel, all of which can be made from hemp:
"On May 6th, John R. Jacobs, Jr., of the Attorney General's department, testified that Standard had interfered with the American explosives industry by blocking the use of a method of producing synthetic ammonia.
As a result of its deals with Farben, the United States had been unable to get the use of this vital process even after Pearl Harbor. Also, the United States had been restricted in techniques of producing hydrogen from natural gas and from obtaining paraflow, a product used for airplane lubrication at high altitudes. . . ."
On August 7th, "Texas oil operator C.R. Starnes appeared to testify that Standard had blocked him at every turn in his efforts to produce synthetic rubber after Pearl Harbor. . . ."
On August 12th, "John R. Jacobs reappeared in an Army private's uniform (he had been inducted the day before) to bring up another disagreeable matter: Standard had also, in league with Farben, restricted production of methanol, a wood alcohol that was sometimes used as motor fuel." (16)
The restriction against methanol production apparently did not apply to the Nazis, however. "As late as April 1943," Higham reveals, "General Motors in Stockholm [Sweden] was reported as trading with the enemy. . .
Further documents show that, as with Ford, repairs on German army trucks and conversion from gasoline to wood-gasoline production were being handled by GM in Switzerland." (17)
The use of hemp as a source of methanol was known to the Nazis, revealed in the pamphlet "The Humorous Hemp Primer," published in Berlin, also in 1943. This document, recently re-published in the 1995 edition of "Hemp and the Marijuana Conspiracy: The Emperor Wears No Clothes," by veteran hemp conspiracy researcher Jack Herer, states that:
"Crops should not only provide food in large quantities, they can provide raw materials for industry. . . . Among such raw materials of especially high value is hemp . . .
"The woody part of this large plant is not to be thrown out, since it can easily be used for surface coatings for the finest floors.
It also provides paper and cardboard, building materials and wall paneling. Further processing will even produce wood sugar and wood gas. . . .
"Anyone who grows hemp today need not fear a lack of a market, because hemp, as useful as it is, will be purchased in unlimited amounts." (18)
The Nazis obviously considered hemp a vital war material that could be used to produce methanol, or "wood gas," at the same time, in 1943, that Du Pont-controlled General Motors in Switzerland was "converting from gasoline to wood-gasoline production." This, taken into consideration along with the earlier statement that Standard Oil-I.G. Farben had "restricted production of methanol" and the GM-Standard Oil-I.G. Farben joint venture, Ethyl, Inc., whose profitability depended on the production of lead-tetraethyl for oil-based petrochemical gasoline - in direct competition with the alternative methanol, or "wood gas,"
certainly opens new avenues of investigation into the existence of a conspiracy against hemp as an alternative, and competing, industrial raw material, by these very same corporations which sold America out to the Nazis for profit and control of world resources and markets.
"Just after Pearl Harbor," writes Seldes, "the Assistant Attorney General, Mr. Thurman Arnold, issued a sensational report of the sabotage of the national [war production] program, the first report naming the practices which were later to be referred to as the treason of big business in wartime. Said Mr. Arnold:
"Looking back over 10 months of defense effort we can now see how much it has been hampered by the attitude of powerful basic industries who have feared to expand their production because expansion would endanger their future control of industry.
"Anti-trust investigations during the past year have shown that there is not an organized basic industry in the United States which has not been restricting production by some device or other in order to avoid what they call 'ruinous overproduction after the war'." (19)
By "ruinous overproduction," of course, they meant free-market competition. So, to question the existence of an industrial conspiracy against competition, during the 1930s and 1940s, is pointless. It has long been totally documented by volumes of evidence, available in the public record. And among this list of convicted corporate conspirators are murderers, racists, pro-Nazi collaborators, blackmailers and American Fascists who plotted at least one armed take-over of the U.S.
government. And the list is not yet complete.
THE FORD MOTOR COMPANY.
Henry Ford, writes Higham, "admired Hitler from the beginning, when the future Fuhrer was a struggling and obscure fanatic. He shared with Hitler a fanatical hatred of Jews."
"Ford's book 'The International Jew' was issued in 1927. A virulent anti-Semitic tract, it was still being distributed in Latin America and the Arab countries as late as 1945. Hitler admired the book and it influenced him deeply. Visitors to Hitler's headquarters at the Brown House in Munich noticed a large photograph of Henry Ford hanging in his office. Stacked high on the table outside were copies of Ford's book. As early as 1923," when Hitler heard that Ford was planning to run for President, he "told an interviewer from the 'Chicago-Tribune,' 'I wish that I could send some of my shock troops to Chicago and other big American cities to help'."
As late as 1940, Ford Motor Company "refused to build aircraft engines for England and instead built supplies of the 5-ton military trucks that were the backbone of German army transportation." (20)
The Ford Motor Company was also aware of the potential of hemp as an alternative industrial resource, devoting many years research to the subject.
In a 1989 ABC Radio broadcast, Hugh Downs reported that in the 1930s, "the Ford Motor Company also saw a future in biomass fuels. Ford operated a successful biomass conversion plant that included hemp at their Iron Mountain facility in Michigan. Ford engineers extracted methanol, charcoal fuel, tar, pitch, ethyl acetate, and creosote - all fundamental ingredients for modern industry, and now supplied by oil-related industries. . . . Henry Ford's experiments with methanol promised cheap, readily-available fuel." (21)
As reported in "Popular Mechanics" in December, 1941, Ford's research represented "an industrial revolution in progress . . . a revolution in materials that will affect every home." (22)
So, it is possible, even likely, that Ford and General Motors conversion "from gasoline to wood-gasoline production" for Nazi Germany, as earlier reported by Higham, involved at least some consideration of hemp as a resource, if not actual production of "wood-gas" from hemp. After all, Ford had already committed several years and significant research dollars to the subject.
The implication of methanol fuel patents, hemp industry research and production facilities, all in the hands of this cabal of Nazi-allied American corporations, during a proven period of anti-competition conspiracies, and wartime blackmail against the U.S. government, should provide additional support for the hemp conspiracy theories. The fact is that Nazi Germany recognized hemp as a vital war material - one which, just before America's entrance into World War II, was positioned to compete in the free-market against the products controlled by the Pro-Nazi American corporations. Unrestricted expansion of United States industrial hemp production threatened not only the profits of these treasonous corporations, but the degree of their control over America's production of vital war materials.
This view of hemp, not as a "dangerous drug" but as a vital war material, was acknowledged by the Kentucky Legislature a little over 100 years before the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. In 1841, according to Professor James F. Hopkins, author of "A History of the Hemp Industry in Kentucky," published by the University of Kentucky Press in 1951: