Summary
Rose’s name, following Anthony Sampson’s book The Seven Sisters, for the seven major oil multinationals that controlled the lion’s share of Middle East oil and made super-profits from it: the US-owned Exxon, Texaco, Gulf, Chevron and Mobil, British-owned BP, and the joint British-Dutch Shell (Israel: The Hijack State — America’s Watchdog in the Middle East, lines 289-293, note 4).
Details
- Exxon is the world’s largest corporation and the other six rank among the top eleven, in the note’s account (lines 289-293).
- For fifty years cheap Middle East oil flowed to Britain, America, Western Europe and Japan and the Seven Sisters made super-profits; the US Department of Commerce estimate for 1970 put the petroleum industry’s net assets in the Middle East at 1.2 billion profit, a 79 per cent return on investment (lines 241-245).
- In the 1973 crisis the Seven Sisters contributed heavily to the Republican Party, including massive illegal contributions at the time of Watergate; the oil contributions to Nixon’s 1972 campaign are estimated at at least $2.7 million, and even the oil companies pleaded with Washington to stop supporting Israel — yet Nixon and Kissinger supported Israel at the crunch (lines 259-265).
- The oil companies lived with the quadrupling of prices after 1973: Exxon’s profits for the third quarter of 1973 were up 80 per cent on the previous year and Gulf’s up 91 per cent, and Exxon’s whole-year profits of $2.5 billion were an all-time record for any corporation (lines 267-269).
- Libya’s Gadaffi dispelled the mystique of the Sisters, in Sampson’s phrase as quoted by Rose, by playing the independent oil companies against them after 1969-1970 (lines 251-255).
Related pages
Israel: The Hijack State — America’s Watchdog in the Middle East, OPEC, Imperialism