Alberta’s Rockefeller Coups, Part 5: Canada is an American Protectorate & Alberta is an Imperial Bezzle

Alberta’s Rockefeller Coups, Part 5: Canada is an American Protectorate & Alberta is an Imperial Bezzle

July 22, 2023

Regan Boychuk

Green Party of Alberta energy critic

Author’s note

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The suggestion that a semi-secret conspiracy of racists transferred imperial control of Canada from the British to the Americans on the eve of the Second World War seems well worth skepticism. But doubt will melt as we meet the elite cast of international characters involved: politicians, bureaucrats, academics, and journalists across the British empire, conspiring for decades. And despite the hubris of their objective, today’s consequences prove their ongoing success.

This fifth installment in the tale of the Rockefeller Bezzle¹ shines more light on the evolution of foreign intervention to seize control of one of the world’s great oil deposits before it produced its first commercial barrel …

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Canada has never been an independent country and Alberta only enjoyed democracy from 1971 to 1991

An imperial United States president (Dziuban 1959 p. 4) and the Rockefellers’ Standard Oil completed their takeover of Alberta on November 22^nd 1938, and their absorption of Canada on August 18^th 1940. By early 1949, billion-barrel oilfields had been tapped, refineries assembled, pipelines were afoot, royalties paid to Albertans had been capped at 1/6^th, and court precedent (together with a US-organized and -staffed ‘regulator’) would ensure American oilmen would never pay more than a token for cleanup in Alberta (Boychuk 2023c).

The amount we can uncover about such a coup a century ago is limited — no less because of the ephemeral nature of a secretive foreign insurgency led through an incredibly young Ernest Manning and a fundamentalist Christian radio evangelist:

the very fact that [premier ‘Bible Bill’] Aberhart’s religious ministry was primarily a radio ministry makes it impossible to assess the spiritual contribution that Aberhart made in Alberta.

Observable events, unfortunately, are earth bound and therefore the premier’s religious impact can be judged only in so far as it was recorded in human acts and actions. (Schultz 1964 p. 207)³

But if the historical record does in fact reveal proof of the United States imposing Minimum Duty on Alberta and Canada through to this day (Boychuk 2023c), we can learn much about Ernest Manning’s Social Credit insurgency as we watch in wonder at the otherwise inexplicable resurrection of Alberta’s current premier, Danielle Smith (Boychuk 2023b).

Ms. Smith’s swift return in 2022 from well-earned political oblivion (CBC 17/12/14; CBC 20/12/14) was aided and abetted by:

1. an impossibly biased news-media (Boychuk 2023a + Fix 2023b forthcoming)⁴;

2. Kris Kinnear’s ‘Sustaining Alberta’s Energy Network’ grift;

3. astroturf ‘truckers’ laying siege to Parliament Hill in Ottawa and the US-Alberta border throughout February;

4. David Parker’s ‘Take Back Alberta’ faux rural revival;

5. the Washington frequent-flier and surprise-quitting premier Jason Kenney and his hand-crafted ‘United Conservative Party’;

6. street-preacher Artur Pawlowski’s new ‘Solidarity Movement of Alberta’, fielding dozens of candidates just days before the 2023 provincial writ dropped …

The Canadian Department of the Interior

The Canadian Department of the Interior was created on “Canada Day” in 1874, ‘in the exact image of the American version to dispose of … land expropriated from First Nation and Métis peoples.’ Like its American analog, ‘the Canadian version managed the extension of settlers and private interests in mining and timber through surveying, parceling, and leasing lands.’ (Black 2018 p. 48; Lazonick & Shin 2020 pp. 32-33)

For British imperialists, Canada was a ‘geopolitical linchpin’, ‘positioned to be the “keystone” of empire’: ‘a nation built on loyalty to the empire, with vast open spaces for immigrants, bountiful natural resources, and a wellspring of racial vigor engendered by a northern climate’. (Cook n.d. v. 15)

Later Canada’s longest serving prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King (WLMK) was ‘a fervent believer in “lynch-pin” theory’. (McColloch 2022 p. 3 quoting Stacey 1981 p. 31) ‘Canada, in fact, had been the crux of the whole Imperial question, and of the Round Table movement.’ (Bosco 2017 pp. 16-17)

Among the leading advocates of the ‘new imperialism’ like Rudyard Kipling and Cecil Rhodes was Sir George Robert Parkin. From the Dictionary of Canadian Biography:

Throughout his life, but especially during the years 1889-95, he was the leading spokesperson for imperial unity. His campaigns through thousands of speeches and interviews, scores of articles, and several books were very wide-ranging.

In the employ of the Imperial Federation League, founded in London in 1884, he left Fredericton to stump across New Zealand and Australia throughout 1889.

He had visited Canada in 1892 to lecture extensively there, and then began his long affiliation with the London Times, writing a series of reports on Canadian history and geography (published together as The Great Dominion in 1895).

… as headmaster of Toronto’s Upper Canada College from 1895 to 1902, Parkin took a moribund institution and … succeeded in making it the premier private school in Canada. …

… he had the ear of governors general Lord Aberdeen, Lord Minto, and Lord Grey; he played a role in the policy decisions of Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier, and was an adviser as well to other cabinet ministers and to leading journalists. …

… Because of his long educational and imperial experience, Parkin was invited by the Rhodes Trust in 1902 to be the first organizing secretary of its scholarship program.

Traveling all over the empire and the United States several times before his retirement in 1920, he established the Rhodes scholarships on a permanent and prestigious basis.

His English home at Goring became a meeting place for current and former scholars as well as for a host of empire-wide visitors.

From this position he continued his speaking and writing on imperial matters, publishing biographies of Sir John A. Macdonald (1908) and … of Rhodes (1912), both of which not surprisingly emphasized their subjects’ imperial virtues. (Cook n.d. v. 15; Breen 1981 p. 283 + ERCB 2013 p. 158)⁵

Even ‘a quarter-century after his death,’ Parkin’s ‘influence is still potent in the Milner Group in Canada. His son-in-law, Vincent Massey, and his namesake, George Parkin de T. Glazebrook, are the leaders of Milner Group’. (Quigley 1981 p. 9)

‘Milner, the chief architect of the Second Anglo-Boer War, and one of the major figures who bear the moral responsibility—on the British side—for the First World War, created the Round Table [in 1908] in order to gain the Dominions’ support for Great Britain in the event of a new European war.’ (Bosco 2017 p. 12; Shoup & Minter 1977 pp. 12-13)⁶

And thanks ‘to the “collateralism” of some historical institutions of the University of Oxford … and a total control of such ’quality press’ as [London’s] The Times and The Observer, the Round Table was able to exercise, within the Empire, a ‘cultural hegemony’, particularly during the thirty years between 1910 and 1940.’ (Bosco 2017 p. 10; Eayrs 1957 + Quigley 1962 p. 213 + Strachan 2009 p. 304 + Marchildon 1996 pp. 19-20, 7, 6)⁷

Imperial ambitions

That span of cultural hegemony (Horton 2023) a century ago was bookended by two Republican Party leaders in the United States whose anti-imperial inclinations threatened the Democratic Party’s Roosevelt presidents’ imperial designs (Pinchot 1940 p. 184): in March 1909, new Republican President William H. Taft put an end to efforts at coordinating international resource conservation (aimed almost exclusively at Canada) that Theodore Roosevelt had championed during his second term. (Gillis & Roach 1986 p. 173)

And in August 1940, the Republican presidential nominee challenging Franklin Delano Roosevelt nearly sparked FDR’s invasion of Canada with 100,000 and our prime minister in tow. (Shogun 1995 pp. 208-10; Roosevelt 1940 #672 pp. 2-3)

The British had been informed of a major oil discovery in what would soon become Alberta in March 1905 (Breen 1981 p. 283) — the Alberta Act received royal assent in July and Ottawa christened the new Canadian province that September. (Wikipedia 1905 in Canada; ERCB 2013 p. 158)⁸

’It seems likely that Milner had been discussing his plans with his old friend Arthur Glazebrook of Toronto as far back as 1905 and that Glazebrook had been looking about for likely men to be members of the projected [Round Table] group. (Quigley 1962 p. 206)

In the course of 1908 Milner gradually shifted his plan for organizing groups of imperial supporters in all the Dominions … toward the establishment of entirely new groups of a smaller and less public character. (Quigley 1962 p. 206)

When Gifford Pinchot had been ‘appointed chief of the US Division of Forestry in 1898, he was given a free hand to act as he saw fit. So began the transformation of an insignificant federal agency into the motherland of American forestry and incubator of the conservation movement.’ (Deckret 2004)

In February 1908, as Milner was ramping up the Canadian Round Table, the Globe and Mail reprinted Pinchot’s prophetic truth: that without resource conservation, “those who come after us will have to pay the price of misery, degradation and failure for the progress and prosperity of our day.” (Pinchot 1908)⁹

That May, as the lame-duck but aspiring emperor was convening US governors for his fleeting National Conservation Commission (Roosevelt 1909), the British ambassador to Washington informed New York Times readers that “The United States and Canada have certain aims in common, more notably among these is the protection of natural resources.” (NYT 15/5/8)

With only a couple months left in his second term, President Roosevelt wrote to the Canadian Governor General on Christmas Eve of 1908 to invite delegates to a conference in his last days at the White House to consider mutual interests in resource conservation. The first President Roosevelt dispatched Pinchot to meet Lord Grey in person before the new year. (AP 27/12/8; NYT 20/2/9)

Grey pledged his government’s complete support and promised it would soon choose delegates to attend Roosevelt’s meeting. … he exceeded his constitutional limitations in making these promises. (Gillis & Roach 1986 p. 172)

By February 1909, Laurier’s Liberal government, Borden’s Conservative opposition, and the Globe and Mail were all outdoing each other posturing over the US president’s call for Canada to ‘conserve’ ‘our’ resources. ‘Borden submitted a resolution, which, if accepted in the form suggested by the Prime Minister, will … prove of incalculable benefit to the Dominion.’ (G&M 2/2/9)¹⁰

The Canadian commissioners (interior + agricultural ministers & a Quebec MP) to Roosevelt’s hasty North American conference played a leading role and were ‘prepared to enter cordially into spirit of the conference’ (G&M 19/2/9), declaring President Roosevelt had ‘struck the keynote of high constructive statesmanship’. (NYT 19/2/9)

‘The President explained that … the treaty was needed to promote this and other matters of mutual interest to the Dominion and the United States.’ (G&M 20/2/9)¹¹

The aspiring American emperor may have ultimately been thwarted in imposing Minimum Duty on Canada by a Republican president in 1909, but ‘the [Canadian] government ended up with the best of all worlds, a commission [of conservation] that would investigate difficult issues of great popular concern but could not make binding recommendations.’ (Gillis & Roach 1986 p. 173)

The politics of conservation ‘revealed that Canadian governments, both before and after the Liberals under Laurier, lacked the political will to face vested interests’ and neither Laurier, nor later governments, ever ‘admitted they ignored advice from their own expert officials. Nor did they admit they were following principles and patterns first advocated by American conservationists.’ (Gillis & Roach 1986 p. 174)

Conservation had been fundamental to white intruders justifying their rule over indigenous peoples and, ‘Of course,’ the international conservation advocated by Theodore Roosevelt ‘would … still … be a resource-based imperialism led by developed nations.’ (Tyrell 2015 pp. 15-17, 208-11)¹²

And ‘conservation’ would also be used to justify US hegemony on the eve of World War Two.

A Round Table conspiracy

The Round Table conspiracy to transfer Canada to the Americans was mainly kept alive in the interim between the turning-point Canadian elections of 1911 and 1935 by ‘scholarship’and political party leadership conventions (as we’ll see), but also by decades of the Rockefellers’ secretive relationships with Canadian prime ministers and premiers.

Shortly after first being elected a member of Parliament in late 1908, William Lyon Mackenzie King became Canada’s Minister of Labor in June 1909. (McGovern & Guttridge 1972 p. 293)

American antitrust law was trying to cut Standard Oil down to size south of the border at the time (Collier & Horowitz 1976 p. 57; UPI 22/7/8), but ‘was wrong-headed, in King’s opinion,’ because it penalized growing businesses. ‘By not providing any administrative machinery, however,’ Makenzie King’s Canadian ‘solution’ ensured ‘the cost and complexity would … serve to deter most complainants with real grievances.’ (Marchildon 1996 p. 214)

Mackenzie King, like most Liberals, lost his seat in the 1911 election and was particularly down on his luck by 1914 when he ‘received a rather mysterious telegram from … Jerome D. Greene … the head of the Rockefeller Foundation, inviting him to New York for a discussion of a major project under Foundation auspices.’ (McGovern & Guttridge 1972 p. 294; Quigley 1981 pp. 188-89)

That same day Professor [Charles William] Eliot [Harvard University president, 1869-1909] wired King his opinion that what the Foundation contemplated offered an “immense” opportunity. “You might greatly serve all white race industries and show the way to industrial accord …” (McGovern & Guttridge 1972 p. 294)¹³

The white race industry the Rockefellers were calling on Mackenzie King to serve was coal mining after Colorado’s infamous 1914 Ludlow Massacre. (Gitelman 1988 pp. 14-15, 21)

‘The crucial point for both Rockefeller and King was that the representation scheme avoided unionism.’ And ‘Although King never publicly admitted it, the germ of [his] ideas [for “company unions”] … sprang from a “practice of [Canada’s] Royal Mounted Police.”’ (Gitelman 1988 pp. 51-52)

And, because in King’s employee representation scheme they had a positive alternative to act upon, their essentially defensive maneuvers would have the ultimate and ironic effect of casting them in the role of innovative reformers. Such a role, in turn, was so highly congenial to their individual ambitions, that both men enjoyed the luxury of having their cake and eating it. (Gitelman 1988 p. 66)

(The Wagner Act would later outlaw company unions in the US in 1935, but they continued under various guises and elsewhere for decades. The seminal study of US white collar crime excluded the oil industry but did note corporate labour relations conferences as a vector for the organization of white-collar crime (Sutherland 1949 p. 229).)

Mackenzie King and Junior — from then on supposed best-friends-for-life — returned triumphantly from their 1915 tour of Colorado to visit father. After an evening’s conversation, John D. Rockefeller Sr. said to the Canadian

“I wish I had had you in the thirty or forty years I was in business to advise me on politics” — to which his son rejoined, “I’m glad you didn’t because I would be prevented then from having Mr. King the next thirty or forty.”’ (Collier & Horowitz 1976 p. 128)

Mackenzie King ‘was always available to Rockefeller, yet he declined [redundant] offers to become a permanent employee.’ (Collier & Horowitz 1976 p. 129n)

‘Much of the correspondence between King and the [Rockefeller Foundation’s] New York office was destroyed willfully.’ The letters often ended with some such statement as Please destroy this letter of which I have kept no copy…

Several of these survived by being incorporated into [WLMK’s] diary or because of one of the parties did keep a copy.

Still other letters were exchanged between seconds … These letters were not preserved in either of the principal’s files. Again, evidence of them having been written was found in the diary.

Telegraphic messages were exchanged in a private code. The telephone also was employed, leaving no record other than the one King chose to indicate in his diary.

These tactics suggest either that King and Rockefeller were seeking to hide something or that they were reluctant to create a pool of information that might be used to embarrass them.

Actually, both things were true. (Gitelman 1988 p. 115)¹⁴

A miraculous comeback

The ongoing Round Table conspiracy was facilitated by such secrecy, but it was furthered most consequentially by new-style political party leadership conventions. Mackenzie King completed a miraculous political comeback very soon after his employ with the Rockefeller Foundation in Colorado.

‘For the first time, the extra-parliamentary wing of a national party played a pivotal role in the selection of a leader’ (Schumacher 1993 p. 7) as Mackenzie King became leader of the Liberal Party on August 7^th 1919.

Conservation, as initially defined in 1907 (Pinchot 1940 p. 183: ‘greatest good of greatest number for longest time’), was soon no longer acceptable to the business community or the federal government. Canada’s Commission of Conservation had been originally granted potentially wide powers, but was dismantled in 1921 and its documents destroyed. (Girard 1991 pp. 20, 19-20n3)

That post-WWI re-alignment of power and the resulting redefinition of conservation — from maximizing public benefit over time into minimizing the waste of maximum production (Scott 1955 p. 31: ‘conservation’ is ‘policy that increases future supply of a natural resource’)¹⁵ — is proving to have existential consequences for humanity and much else on this finite planet.

In 1921, Mackenzie King became the Prime Minister of Canada, ‘a position he would hold for all but five of the years until his retirement in 1948. As a token of his affection for King, Junior sent him a gift of $100,000 [$1 million in 2010 dollars] when he left the government and had the Rockefeller Foundation provide another [$1 million in 2010 dollars] to help King prepare his private papers and diaries for publication.’ (Collier & Horowitz 1976 pp. 119, 129n; Gitelman 1988 p. 31n6)

Who was the Canadian prime minister that served the only five years Mackenzie King did not between 1921 and 1948? A former Rockefeller executive in Calgary and one of the richest Canadians of the day, who would transfer control over natural resources to the provinces as well as create the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the Bank of Canada. (Wikipedia R.B. Bennett)

In October 1927, ‘the Conservative Party held a national delegate convention to elect Richard Bedford Bennett as leader. Since then, national conventions have been used to select national party leaders’. (Schumacher 1993 p. 7)

Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington may have also been alluding to Canadian political parties of that earlier era when he later advised David Rockefeller about the “governability of democracies” after hippies and the international gold standard:

The lesson of the 1960s was that American political parties were extraordinarily open and vulnerable organizations, in the sense that they could easily be penetrated, and even captured, by highly motivated and well-organized groups with a cause and a candidate.

… the signs of decay in the American party system have their parallels in the party systems of other industrialized democratic countries. (Huntington 1975 pp. 89-90)¹⁶

Two-faced academics

Two-faced academics were another significant factor in the Round Table’s success and secrecy. The very academic discipline of International Relations (in which I did an undergraduate degree at the University of Calgary), turns out to have been an imperial conspiracy from inception. (Thakur, Davis & Vale 2017 pp. 3-5, 15, 19)

“Once … the truth had been revealed through the Imperial Statement,” one of the Round Table’s and International Relations’ most vigorous founders wrote to another, “human agency was required for propaganda purposes only. … it would then only need a few publicly spirited ‘men’ in each Dominion ‘to shout “harooh” (sic) in a spontaneous manner’ to create a movement for the end goal, the creation of an Imperial Union.” (Thakur, Davis & Vale 2017 p. 17; NYT 19/8/38a p. 1)¹⁷

The [US] Council on Foreign Relations is a key part of a network of people and institutions usually referred to by observers as “the establishment.” …

The origins of the Council on Foreign Relations lie in the reactions of a small number of American “men of affairs” to the First World War.

At the Versailles Conference a group of American and British participants began discussing the need for an organization which could engage in the continuous study of international relations. …

… Thus … [in May 1919] at the Majestic Hotel in Paris, a group of Americans and British agreed to form an Anglo-American organization.

It was officially named the Institute of International Affairs and was to have branches in the United Kingdom and the United States. (Shoup & Minter 1977 pp. 9-12)

Those same two-faced Anglo-American elites put out a spate of publications in 1936 and 1937 pretending that colonies “did not pay.” (Vitalis 2020 pp. 40-41) And the weekend before the second President Roosevelt summoned Mackenzie King to Ogdensburg, New York to ride back across the border with 100,000 invading US troops if need be, Pinchot took a prominent stage in the scientific journal Nature to argue international resource ‘conservation’ could also bring about “permanent peace.” (Lewis & Miller 2010; Pinchot 1940 pp. 184-85)

But, rather than saving the world from war, FDR’s 1940 absorption of Canada only whet the American elite’s imperial appetite. (Shogun 1999 pp. 1-2)¹⁸ Alberta First Nations had been one of the appetizers.

Something quite different

The ‘Canadian and US Interior Departments were analogs … However, something quite different happened to the Canadian Interior Department.’ The Liberal government of John D. Rockefeller Jr’s BFF Mackenzie King ‘abolished it in 1936, decentralizing and redistributing its power across separate departments and the provincial governments of [Standard Oil’s] Alberta [Boychuk 2022c fn 2-4], Manitoba, and Saskatchewan.’ ‘In the case of Canada, settler colonial bureaucracy was not only domesticated. It was provincialized.’ (Black 2018 pp. 48-49; Parliament of Canada Historical Table of Roles and Responsibilities)

Stoney Chief John Snow recalled Alberta’s provincialized responsibilities and “the conservation movement which swept Canada and the United States in the first decade of the [20^th] century, winning many influential converts”:

“This movement should have been a great help and joy to my people. We have always been conservationists regarding the earth, wildlife, and plant life.

Ever since the arrival of the Europeans in the New World, my people had been trying to express conservation ideals to that society.

Our ideals were — and still are — retaining and preserving wildlife and natural beauty and protecting the natural environment, instead of polluting and destroying our Mother Earth.

Therefore, with the growth of the conservation movement, my people might have felt that at last we were getting our message across.

Surely this movement would help preserve what little we had left that was natural and beautiful. Perhaps it was not too late!

But the conservationist movement and the hopes of its non-Indian supporters were very different from what my people had envisioned.

Although legislation was passed to preserve certain areas for conservationist purposes, other government departments continued their mass destruction of the beautiful forests, the open prairies, and the mountainous areas of this continent.

And the movement itself was to prevent us from going to our ceremonial and sacred places, which all ended up in a park or another restricted area.

It was later to spoil the sacred mountains by creating attractions for the collection of tourist dollars.

The problem was that the conservationist movement emerged from a money-oriented society which never learned our ways, our values, our traditions.

The sacred waters, the hot springs that we used for healing and cleansing, were to become tourist resorts; our sacred mountains were to become ski areas and parks where we no longer have the right to pursue our religious practice.

The pipestones that we got from the mountains and the natural earth paints that we used in our religious ceremonies and for other special occasions were bulldozed over and concrete now covers them.” (Snow 1977 pp. 76-77; on post-WWI end to conservation efforts, see Girard 1991 pp. 20, 37, 19-20n2 + HoC 26/5/21)¹⁹

Chief Snow was being polite in that critique. The infamous Canadian colonial administrator Duncan Campbell Scott had explained in 1920, soon after WLMK’s return: “I want to get rid of the Indian problem. … [the objective of forcing Indigenous children between the ages of 7 and 15 to be interned at residential schools] … is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic, and there is no Indian question, and no Indian department”. ( quoted in McDougall 2008)

‘As early as 1907, Peter Henderson Bryce, the physician and chief medical officer of [Duncan Campbell Scott’s] Department of Indian Affairs … noted that the combination of poor sanitation, crowding and poor ventilation were making residential schools the perfect environment for the transmission of TB [Tuberculosis]. In fact, he remarked it was “almost as if the prime conditions for the outbreak of epidemics had been deliberately created.”’ (Faust & Heffernan 2021; Bryce {1907} 1922)

‘Dr. Bryce investigated conditions in numerous residential schools and … in Southern Alberta, he found that 28 per cent of residential students had died, with TB being the most common cause of death.’ (Faust & Heffernan 2021; Starblanket 2018)²⁰

While Hitler’s Nazis were still consolidating power in Germany with Anglo-American aid and finance (Veblen 1920;²¹ Preparata 2005; Ronald 2023),

TB death rates in [Canadian] First Nations communities in the 1930s and ’40s were 700 per 100,000, some of the highest ever recorded in a human population.

But in residential schools, they were astronomical — 8,000 per 100,000 children. (CP 18/7/21; Daschuk 2013)

“Canada created such laws, and because its courts and its citizens viewed Indians as primitive savages,” Harold Cardinal wrote at the turn of the millennium “its actions were sanctioned by its legal system and by its citizenry.” “Residential schools represented only one element of a continuing campaign by Europeans in the ‘New World’ to destroy its original inhabitants. In this sense, the horrors experienced by Indian Nations were no less than those experienced by others.” (Cardinal 1999 p. xv)²²

Convenient blind spots

Many of the reasons this genocidal plunder or the American takeover of Alberta come as any surprise to Canadians have to do with academics and censors. And the same is true for the Round Table groups that facilitated the transfer of Canada from the British to American empires. Convenient blind spots were no small part of the nature of Milner’s groups:

… a number of notable points which were evident among the Round Table groups later and which were always significant to Milner.

The first point is his emphasis on privacy and informality especially among the older (and more significant) persons.

The second point is the distinction of two groups of which the more formal (and therefore less private) is to be young men.

The third point is that the real goal of the organization is “to influence” outsiders and to do so without them knowing it.

These three points are of great significance because they are typical of the way Milner operated and help to explain the difficulty a historian has in uncovering Milner’s own operations and influence. (Quigley 1962 p. 208)

The Rockefeller Foundation’s use of charitable foundation funds in response to the Ludlow Massacre to further family business interests had been severely criticized by the federal Commission on Industrial Relations:

The investigation by the Commission was headline news for weeks and resulted in a tremendous amount of bad publicity for both the family and the RF.

This affair was a turning point for John D. Rockefeller Jr. and the RF with regard to their approach toward the social sciences.

Never again would family “class” interest be so clearly visible. Instead these interests were subsumed into the foundations in which were the scientific organizations designed to “give” in an unbiased and objective manner. …

Rockefeller philanthropy was extremely careful to both protect and maintain an impartial image. There were two levels of policy.

First, the explicit level which appeared in foundation reports. Second, the implicit level which is contained in the internal documents.

… The public statements were by design brief. The more sensitive the policy the more it was shrouded in secrecy. … the foundations steered clear of providing any information that might lead people to infer that they were attempting to control any aspect of social life.

… The definition of the ‘social sciences’ was redefined. These sciences were grouped by level. Economics, sociology and political science were at the level of “social forces” while psychology, anthropology and history were described as related subjects.

… During the inter-war period Rockefeller philanthropy was the only source of major funds for the social sciences in North America. Only Rockefeller philanthropy had a clear and coordinated policy. … there is clear evidence that the impact was substantial. (Fisher 1983 pp. 209, 211, 224)²³

As a part of its re-shaping of the social sciences, the Rockefellers also co-ordinated the creation of neo-classical economics as an academic discipline throughout the 1920’s and ’30’s, emanating from the London School of Economics and Rockefeller money. (Tribe 2021 pp. 5, 31, 34, 31n37, 304-5n, 195, 331, 334-35, 34, 316-17; De Vroey 1975)²⁴

Blind-by-design to the complexities of class + history + continuous time, these ‘neo-economists’ were the international imperial class’s mandarins from the outset.

Secondary status

With history relegated to secondary status among the social sciences (and eventually removed completely from economics curriculums), and the study of international relations fenced off by the Round Table conspiracy, settlers in Australia & New Zealand & Canada have been subjected to the curious phenomenon of ‘national imperialists’: scholarship and popular narratives of history highlighting the local peculiarities of imperialism rather than the international coordination at its core. (Cole 1970 p. 44)

One of Canada’s best-known historians, Jack Granatstein, is perfectly aware that Mackenzie King’s August 18^th 1940 agreement “marked the shift of Canada from a British Dominion to Canada as an American protectorate.” However, Granatstein also noted the “delicate condition” of non-superpowers: “Some people realized this at the time, but … only the very foolish felt obliged to say so in public. … For the ordinary-sized, relations with giants must always be careful”. (Granatstein 1974 pp. 8, 4)

The second President Roosevelt’s parting advise after declaring Canadians under his protection exactly two years earlier at Kingston, Ontario had been that we Canadians should studiously cultivate “humility, humanity and humor” (NYT 19/8/38a p. 3)²⁵ — presumably to cope with our subjugation.

Most intellectuals have been quite successfully selected, disciplined, and incentivized for such obedience and appear to cope rather well with the unearned prestige of their lucrative subordination. (Fenwick 1938; Liang 1938; Shepard 1938 p. vi; Zimmerman 1957 pp. 25, 31-32 + Jacobs 1959 p. 1521; Thompson 1967b p. 285; Lovejoy & Homan 1967 pp. vii, 19-20; Wollman 1967 pp. 1099-1100, 1107; AIME 1968; McDonald 1971 pp. vii, 148)²⁶

About this same time (though supressed for decades and only published once, 55 years later), George Orwell wrote about the “sinister fact” of voluntary censorship in British society, where the well-educated understand very well what is ‘not done to mention’:

“The British press is extremely centralized, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics.

… At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.

It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady.

Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness.” (Orwell 1945 pp. 98-99)

When it comes to Canada’s protectorate status after the Ogdensburg agreement, Canadian journalists and historians evidently understood quite well that it just wouldn’t do to say here either.

Undesirable information

When an American military graduate student completed doctoral work related to Ogdensburg with full access to American files, Canadian officials thought it ‘undesirable that the first information concerning the more confidential aspects of Canadian-American wartime relations should reach the Canadian public through a private study published in the United States.’ (Stacey 1954b p. 1)

Another of Canada’s best-known historians, C.P. Stacey, was tasked with publishing an account of events in an international relations journal to beat the new American PhD to any publication punch. (Stacey 1954a)

A 1986 declassification shows Stacey’s 1954 International Journal article was censored by the military, where Stacey was the director of Army HQ’s historical section: ‘specific references to decisions by the Cabinet War Committee made on particular dates eliminated and more general statements attributing these decisions to “the Canadian government” were substituted.’ (Stacey 1954b pp. 1-2)

Stacey’s 1954 classified preface also warned those who came after: ‘The dates of meetings … and other related details, must not be referred to in documents intended for publication unless and until formal clearance is received from the Sovereign or the Governor General’ (Stacey 1954b p. 2)²⁷

Extracting tribute

With Round Table-tool Ernest Manning installed in Alberta in August 1935, FDR’s potential third-party presidential challenger assassinated in September (AJ-C 10/9/20; AP 26/6/91; Deutsch 1963 pp. 2-3),²⁸ and Round Table-tool Mackenzie King back as prime minister in October, the aspiring American emperor didn’t waste any time extracting tribute or pressing for more from his improved position.

The difference in popular vote between WLMK’s Liberals’ 1930 defeat and their 1935 victory was miniscule (46.2% vs. 46.8%) (Reid 1936 pp. 111, 116, 114-15) — clearly it was the 1930’s Great Depression that both defeated the Liberals and brought them back to power in Ottawa. (With a Rockefeller exec as PM in the interim.)

On election night, October 14^th 1935, Mackenzie King called the six-tenths-of-a-percent shift in voting preferences to be ‘“an un-mistakable verdict” in favor of an agreement with the United States.’ (Kottman 1965 p. 291)

With America’s stars finally aligned in both Ottawa and Edmonton, Mackenzie King’s negotiators were in Washington within weeks and major concessions were conceded in an agreement signed one month after Canadian vote. (Kottman 1965 pp. 283, 289, 292, 293, 275)²⁹

In a foreign policy speech akin to Woodrow Wilson’s 1907 promise to protect the foreign concessions of American investors (Van Alstyne 1960 p. 201), FDR pretended in August 1936 that Canadians already understood the Monroe Doctrine applied to us and asked “those who wish our friendship look us in the eye and take our hand.” (Roosevelt 1936; Beatty 1991 p. 4)

With a second term secured in November 1936’s presidential election, the second President Roosevelt could taste the empire on his lips and quickly pushed for further trade concessions culminating in another lop-sided trade agreement. (McColloch 2022 p. 8)³⁰

A royal visit

As that second trade ‘deal’ was being finalized in September 1938, FDR invited the reigning British monarch to America for a first-ever visit as a part of its first-ever royal tour of Canada. (Harris 2015)

“It would be an excellent thing for Anglo-American relations if you could visit the United States. … you might care to avoid the heat of Washington and … visit us at our country home in Hyde Park … on the direct route between New York City and Canada. … you both might like three or four days … with no formal entertainments”. (Roosevelt 1938c p. 1)³¹

Those summer days that British royalty were hosted at FDR’s White House and his Hyde Park mansion were a moment of unappreciated imperial and economic peril in America. Placed before the President on June 9^th was (in so many words) the question: Would the United States develop as a national economy or an international empire?

This moment of crisis had grown out of pre-WWI attempts to transfer Canada from the British to the Americans and it was high time for a reigning monarch to visit the ‘former colonies’ for a consult.

The initial popular support for genuine conservation at the turn of the century and the expanding activism and democracy of the 1930’s in the wake of the Great Depression had reached its logical conclusion in the National Resources Committee report of June 1939.

While the King and Queen were at the White House, US Secretary of the Interior and chair of the National Resource Committee delivered to the second President Roosevelt what might be considered a pioneering economic study in “system dynamics”: The Structure of the American Economy. (National Resources Committee 1939 pp. ii-iii, iv; Keen 2022 pp. 138, 147-48 + Keen 2020 pp. 361-62)

It was “the first major attempt to show the inter-relation of the economic forces which determine the use of our national resources.” (Ickes 1939) On the advice of the London School of Economics’ Friedrich Hayek, David Rockefeller wrote his University of Chicago economics PhD dissertation unconvincingly attacking an early draft of the committee report. (Rockefeller 1941 pp. 200-9, 212)³²

For British and American royalty, the frightening word in the economic study was “national”. The reason national development is so antithetical to imperialists is because it presupposes that resource rent will be utilized for local development. Plainly unacceptable to foreign looters.

Was the US to remain a republic or grow into an international empire? Developing nationally would preclude (or at least de-prioritize) foreign adventures and all the resulting treasure. Rational management of national endowments and the public utilization of resource rents offered a viable model of democratic development. (Hudson 2022b) Empire does not.

But, in June 1939, the Anglo-American elite conspired for empire.

King George VI’s notes of his conversations with the president at Roosevelt’s Hyde Park mansion reveal that FDR was “definitely anti Russian” ( recall Veblen 1920 pp. 468-69) and pledged to shoot German U-boats first, ask questions later, and to enter the Second World War if London was bombed. (King George 1939)

“The idea is that USA should relieve us of these responsibilities” in Trinidad, Bermuda, Brazil, Haiti, Cuba, & West Indies the George wrote, “but can it be done without a declaration of war”? (King George 1939)

Canada and Newfoundland were also on the American wish list later forwarded to the British ambassador, but were attended to the previous year (without a declaration of war), when Mackenzie King invited FDR to Ottawa to extend the Monroe Doctrine.

The Associated Press noted that the American public was strongly against any foreign alliance, but reported the King & Queen’s visit may well produce an Anglo-American alliance ‘without the ritual.’ (AP 11/6/39)

King George VI and Queen Elizabeth I had come ‘to the throne at a time when British prestige was falling’, the New York Times noted. ‘Behind them they leave a dominion as legally independent of the British Government as ever but more closely bound to the crown which holds the empire together.’ (NYT 12/6/39)³³

The United States was being re-incorporated into the globe-spanning white supremacist empire, but not as a junior partner. The following summer, the new boss took formal control of his dowry: Canada and the vast bitumen fields of northern Alberta.

Imperial logic

Before the end of the month of the royal visit, FDR had called the British ambassador to explain the US required foreign bases. ‘It took less than a week for the British to agree to American use of whatever colonial bases it might require’. (Beatty 1991 p. 6)

Soon after that, in early July, the ’British Foreign Office thought it might be necessary “to give the Canadian Government some inkling of the plan.”’ (Beatty 1991 p. 7)

By the end of 1939, the Rockefeller Foundation had granted $44,500 [$1 million in 2023 dollars] to finance the US State Department’s War and Peace Studies Project the following year. The aim of the vast undertaking, to which the Rockefeller Foundation alone gave over $300,000 [$6.5 million in 2023 dollars] in a six-year period, was to directly influence the government.’ (Shoup & Minter 1977 pp. 119-20)

That half dozen years’ worth of private-public imperial planning linked almost 100 individuals in five cabinet-level departments and 14 federal agencies, who collectively attended 362 meetings and prepared 682 separate documents for the president and State Department. (Shoup & Minter 1977 pp. 121-22)³⁴

Within months, one of those handy-dandy Ivy League law profs published a refresher on the US foreign policy doctrine of Minimum Duty, lamenting Latin America’s claim to the “peculiar virtue” of “civil equality”. (Borchard 1940 p. 450) Imperial logic evidently necessitates equality’s peculiarity.

The Rockefellers’ War and Peace Studies project’s

desire for influence began to be fulfilled immediately after the first meetings of the groups …

The Territorial Group, headed by [Council director, territorial expert, and Roosevelt advisor Isaiah] Bowman, considered the strategic importance of Greenland to the United States … and … discussed the possibility that Germany might conquer Demark and thus be in a position to claim Danish colonies, including Greenland …

It suggested that applying the Monroe Doctrine to Greenland could deter Germany.

Early in April 1940 the German army overran Denmark. Bowman was summoned to the White House to talk with the President … with a copy of the Council’s recommendation in hand …

At his press conference on April 18, Roosevelt stated that he was satisfied that Greenland belonged to the American continent (Shoup & Minter 1977 pp. 122-23)³⁵

A manifesto

On June 12^th 1940, only four months into his role, the American ambassador to Canada was replaced with Jay Pierrepont Moffat (NYT 13/6/40 p. 4), who would be alone in accompanying the Canadian prime minister to Ogdensburg that August.

Two days later, on June 14^th, the royal commission investigating the US-organized Alberta regulator finally released its report (CH 14/6/40; Breen 1993 p. 186) — the same day that Nelson Rockefeller was presenting his “Hemisphere Economic Policy” at the White House. (Colby & Dennett 1995 pp. 94-96)

Rockefeller read aloud ‘what began more as a manifesto than a mere policy recommendation: “Regardless of whether the outcome of the war is a German or Allied victory, the United States must protect its international position through the use of economic measures”’. (Collier & Horowitz 1976 p. 212)³⁶

By mid-July the Council of Foreign Relations created and controlled an ad hoc pressure group called the “Century Group”, named after the upper-class New York club they met at, who ‘decided something had to be done to aid Britain … Francis P. Miller, the organizational director of the Council and a member of the Political Group of the War and Peace Studies Project … and four others travelled to Washington on August 1, 1940.’

Some [Council members] met with President Roosevelt, others with various cabinet members. The next day, the President discussed the Century Group’s idea with the cabinet.

… In this way the negotiations began which culminated in the Destroyers for Bases agreement in early September 1940. (Shoup & Minter 1977 pp. 123-24; Lindsay 2011)

In reality, the US military knew the token gesture could not save Britain from the naval agreement they’d signed with Hitler in 1935 allowing the German navy to expand: “If we turn the destroyers over to England we will lose them,” former Army Chief of Staff Malin Craig advised, “and if England is conquered we will need them not only against Germany but against Japan.” (Shogun 1995 p. 209)³⁷

A phone call

On August 16^th 1940, President FDR ‘picked up the telephone and spoke to Mr. King at his summer home near Ottawa. He told him that the following day he would be attending military manoeuvres near Ogdensburg, New York, and invited him to join him there. Mr. King accepted’. (Stacey 1954a p. 111)

As the second President Roosevelt awaited Mackenzie King’s arrival, he thought it important to note to reporters that the 100,000 troops he’d spent the day drilling & 21-gun-saluting were “the largest gathering of American troops” “since the close of the Civil War”. (Roosevelt 1940 #672, p. 2)

Asked if there would be any news about the defense of Canada, President Roosevelt-the-Second replied:

“It was just two years ago today, wasn’t it? that I was over in Kingston and said something? {Roosevelt 1938a}

… I think that is good enough. It is still good.

Also I hear the bridge is paying. … That is important.” (Roosevelt 1940 #672, p. 3)

‘Mr. King … drove to Ogdensburg accompanied by Mr. Moffat. The evening was devoted to long discussions. Mr. King spent the night on the President’s train. … Mr. King had no other Minister with him. … It appears that on the question of military relations between the two countries Mr. Roosevelt took the initiative, and that it was he who proposed the immediate creation of a joint Canadian-American board. … the Prime Minister accepted at once.’ (Stacey 1954a pp. 111-12)

‘After dinner when he and King turned to the destroyer issue’ [i.e. Canada]. … Now, the President said, only “legal technicalities” stood in the way of consummation.’ (Shogun 1995 pp. 208-10)³⁸

President Roosevelt had been accompanied by his Secretary of War, who took part in the conversations.

No paper was signed, and the [110-word] release remained the basis of the new board. Canada published its text in her Treaty Series and included it in an order in council.

The United States regarded it as an executive agreement not subject to ratification by the Senate, and it was never submitted to that body.

No international arrangement of comparable importance has ever been concluded more informally.

Mr. King appears to have had no opportunity of consulting his ministerial colleagues before his interview with the President (Stacey 1954a pp. 112-13)

‘Seen in retrospect … the creation of the Permanent Joint Board of Defence … marked the shift of Canada from a British Dominion to Canada as an American protectorate.’ (Granatstein 1974 p. 8) ‘FDR informed Congress of the [’Destroyers for Bases’] deal, describing it as “an epochal and far-reaching act of preparation for continental defense in the face of grave danger.”’ (Lindsay 2011)

In reality, even the editors of Time magazine conceded it was true “the President had not taken either Congress or the people into his confidence and attempted to educate them” (Life 1940)³⁹ about the Destroyers deal, let alone the Anglo-American alliance the President had committed them to, let alone again the absorption of Canada.

We know why our North American leaders and assorted compradors/apologists have kept citizens in the dark, too: Because the American occupation of Canada could not be sustained in the plain light of day. May the sun soon shine here again, as it began to during Alberta’s all-too-brief democratic interlude 1971-1991.

Where To From Here? Remaining obstacles to the guiding principle of genuine conservation

There are three parts of produce and three original orders of society.

The whole annual produce of the land and labour of every country … naturally divides itself … into three parts;

the rent of land,
the wages of labour,
and the profits of stock;

and constitutes a revenue to three different orders of people;

to those who live by rent,
to those who live by wages,
and to those who live by profit.

These are the three great, original and constituent orders of every civilized society, from whose revenue that of every other order is ultimately derived.

(Smith 1776 bk1, ch11, v1: p. 276)

The Rockefellers’ neoclassical economics amputated Adam Smith’s class analysis from political economy and the icon of the University of Chicago’s anti-classical reaction in economics, Professor J.B. Clark, left ‘the public with an impression that unearned rents simply do not exist’. (Hudson 2021a p. 446; Collier & Horowitz 1976 p. 49: JDR Sr: “best investment I ever made”)⁴⁰

Rentiers’ efforts to rob the public of class analysis and the very concept of unearned profit should make us rather wary we are missing valuable insights without them. The economics necessary for salvaging (and funding) a survivable future must utilize those two lenses as it rescues from the dustbin one of the strongest impulses of the democratic public interest: genuine conservation.

It was the threat of expanding democracy that drove elites to conspire around the Round Table. It was the quiet collateral of foreign concessions and the mystified & international nature of banking that have kept the real money and the real decisions from ever descending to the plebs, whatever fleeting formal democracy valiant efforts might achieve in any particular jurisdiction.

If resource rents could be stewarded in the public interest, the march of progress under the guiding light of democracy in the 20^th century seemed inevitable (Hudson 2021c) — sparking in reaction the ‘conservation’ movement, the Round Table conspiracy, the post-WWI redefinition of conservation, and the academic covering of tracks.

The original conservation movement that built public support from 1898, when Roosevelt & Pinchot championed maximizing public benefit over time, was betrayed after the First World War.

If you take conservation from a political economist and hand it to a neoclassical economist, what you get is prorationing. Because neoclassical economic training has fossilized the discipline’s inability to think or theorize in continuous time, all our regulators are doing is minimizing the waste of maximum production. (Rockefeller 1941 p. 212)

Prorationing does not equal conservation — but the citizens are not aware because conservation scholarship since the Second World War has been funded and coordinated by Resources for the Future, much like the Rockefellers’ web of foundations later did with the environmental movement.

North America has never really had oil and gas regulators or independent conservation boards. The state and provincial boards were established by industry itself in the 1930’s (Lovejoy & Homan 1967 ch. 2)⁴¹ and organized around prorationing, though they all feign to be ‘Conservation Boards’.

Those state and provincial oil and gas regulators are colonial administrators of a fourth order of global society: imperialists. International by definition and typically above the local law, the new imperial class was birthed by the gifting of the British empire’s foreign concessions to a federated network of rentiers — thwarted on the eve of WWI, but quietly victorious on the eve of WWII.

If there is to be any chance of a decent future, democratizing resource management through genuine conservation coordinated in the public interest through transparent and accountable public interest regulators must be our highest priority in each jurisdiction — not the least because that is where nature’s surplus is to be found to fund necessary remedies.

Only resource rent can fund cleanup and transition to zero carbon. There are trillions in remaining resource rent to be captured for democratic priorities, even within a 1.5C carbon budget — the only question is whether the public will start acting like owners before the Fourth Order pillages us into oblivion.

Financial imperialism

Modern American imperialism since the end of the international gold standard in August 1971 (just as Alberta slipped from Washington’s grip) has increasingly become financial imperialism. (Hudson 1971 pp. 321-46)⁴²

And contrary to genuine conservation, the financialization of oil and gas development only accelerates the looting. And by turning the imperial flow of unearned profit/resource rent into ‘a flow of interest payments leads the financial sector to protect them [rentiers/imperialists] ideologically, politically, and academically.’ (Hudson 2021b p. 569)

The real objective of the US invasion of Iraq was to keep that cheap production off the market to avoid tanking prices from the deluge of bitumen production coming on stream since the 1991/92 coups in Alberta. The same day Marines pulled down Saddam’s statue, completing the occupation, the US officially recognized 175 billion barrels of bitumen reserves as proven and thus legal collateral for private money creation. (Boychuk 2022c n17)

The primary aim of today’s commercial and central banking, especially since 2008, has been to fuel capital gains by more credit/debt creation.

The financial sector’s returns are best seen not as real wealth on the asset side of the balance sheet, but as overheads on the liabilities side. (Hudson 2021a p. 438)⁴³

Those liabilities are obscured by private money creation delaying and magnifying the inevitable consequences. But ‘Now that the reality that banks create money is acknowledged, so too must be the role of the finance sector in creating asset price bubbles and financial crises, and in enabling the accumulation and concealment of wealth.’ (Keen 2022 pp. 141-42; McLeay, Radia & Thomas 2014 p. 14 + Stuckey, Becklumb & Frigon 2021 pp. 2-3)

A proper understanding of the oil and gas and bitumen industries in real life requires the incorporation of private money creation — a tantalizing opportunity put within grasp by Steve Keen’s system dynamics software, Minsky. (Keen 2021b)⁴⁴

The only rational way to cope with the confines of a finite planet is to optimize remaining resource rent available within a 1.5C carbon budget. That means only producing the most profitable remaining reserves within that dynamic budget, and capturing all excess profits/rent for the democratic prioritization of oilfield cleanup, an equitable transition for wage-earners, and reparations for the industry’s victims.

My friends and I have been endeavoring for years to develop such a conservation program here in Alberta. We have the data and the analysis, but environmental groups are not interested for some reason, foundations refuse to fund any such work, and the media is strangely incurious about Alberta’s multi-trillion dollar looting.

We know how to optimize what remains of oilpatch profit in Alberta, all that remains is political awareness among citizens sufficient to enforce the public interest. Time is of the essence, but so is power.

A major obstacle

One major obstacle to achieving that power is North America’s environmental movement. Fifty years ago already, the US Interior Department circulated an internal memo claiming the Rockefellers “controlled” two conservation organizations, had “infiltrated” eight more, while another 11 were “suspect”. (Talbott 1972 p. 143; Collier & Horowitz 1976 pp. 146-48, 214-15, 242-44, 301-4n, 381-87, 393-94, 399, 400-1)⁴⁵

Speaking much later at an event still steeped in Round Table vibes, John Ralston Saul wondered aloud where all the NGOs had come from in the early 1990s: “the real question, the democratic question … I don’t hear it being asked”: “the NGO movement seemed to appear out of nowhere. Where did it come from?” (Saul 2004 pp. 39-40)

The answer to Saul’s question had first revealed itself in September 1991, shortly after the US had begun reasserting its grip on Alberta after local Premiers Lougheed & Getty slipped the province and its oil from American fingers, 1971-91.

At his confirmation hearing, the new head of the CIA declared “the Intelligence Community and the CIA in particular must … develop better popular understanding and support for US intelligence activities”. (Gates 1991 p. 444)

That weekend the Washington Post’s foreign editor answered the call with a huge feature on the phenomenon of spyless coups then underway in Russia (and Alberta). (WP 22/9/91)

The US intelligence community’s media operations also came out of the shadows, intertwined as they would become with the environmental movements on the ‘left’ and the Koch Brothers-fronted network on the ‘right’ that soon developed after the President Bush-the-First failed to get re-elected after the First Gulf War.

‘Frank Wisner, the head of CIA covert operations during the mid-1950s, once remarked that he could play his media assets like a “mighty Wurlitzer.”’ But by 1991, Wisner’s mighty Wurlitzer had got even better. ‘It’s called CNN … it doesn’t need playing by anybody but the independent journalists who work there.”’ (WP 22/9/91)⁴⁶

A former Bush I communications official, Jeff Nesbit later described the secret origins of the Tea Party from 1993 — which sound an awful lot like what gave Canadians the likes of Mackenzie King, Bennett, Manning(s), Klein, and Smith:

Rich Fink, Charles Koch’s political adviser, and his various Koch protégés have occasionally talked publicly about what would be needed to take over one of the two national political parties from the outside … It would take:

• an extensive academic network to support it intellectually;

• policy networks in every state to draw on that intellectual underpinning from hundreds of American universities;

• a true political grassroots alliance that extended to all of those state capitals and worked closely with the academic and policy network;

• a propaganda arm that could bring tightly controlled messaging and narratives to the fore in the state networks in a way that looked like independent journalism;

and a national coordinating group that could enforce discipline in what would otherwise be a chaotic, unruly, wildly disconnected political network that ran the gamut from the patriot movement to American exceptionalism.

… There are no mistakes or accidents in the Tea Party movement. Its leadership has made certain of that.’ (Nesbit 2016)

These vigorous and deeply-funded clandestine networks raise the financial and organizational costs of democratic participation. “Where investment and organization by average citizens are weak,” Thomas Ferguson warns, “power passes by default to major investor groups, which can far more easily bear the costs of contending for control of the state.” (Ferguson 2023)⁴⁷

An eye on Canada

The United States has always had its eye on Canada, but the media has almost always been this bad too — and that is another major obstacle to necessary reform on these crucial issues.

The US’ very first constitution (1781-89) provided for the admission of Canada (Klarman 2016 p. 667n46), and on the eve of the US Civil War, very serious consideration was given to invading Canada instead of fighting slave-owners. (Seward 1861; Lincoln 1861)

The Secretary of State had brought the New York Times with him to Washington to present his alternate plan to President Lincoln. The NYT was holding its front-page for the story of Seward’s Memorandum and Lincoln’s reply, but the President unexpectedly balked at the foreign adventures (Sowle 1967 pp. 235-39) — at least until the South was sorted. (Shi 1978 p. 233)

By the summer of 1935 as the Ernest Manning’s Social Credit was poised to ride the Great Depression into power, US historians were at Canadian conferences noting increased American interest in earlier US attempts to annex Canada. (Smith 1935 p. 67)⁴⁸

The ferociously extensive coverage — often 4 pages per day — of the ‘Calgary Herald and the Edmonton Journal were … instrumental in the demise of the UFA government’ in 1935. As reward and insurance against what was coming, dozens of Albertan newspapers received the only Pultizer awards ever given outside the US a few months before FDR visited Canada to extend the Monroe Doctrine. (Savage-Hughes & Taras 1992 p. 200; CP 3/5/38)

The New York Times’ and Globe & Mail’s coverage of FDR in 1938 and 1940 are vomit-inducing in hindsight of what was afoot. Editors and reporters were obviously in on the Round Table game. (Boychuk 2023c n15)⁴⁹

Betrayed by the fourth estate serving the 4^th Order, Canadian citizens never had a chance of understanding what was being done by their political representatives.

The summer after Minimum Duty in Alberta had been reasserted in 1991, but before Ralph Klein was installed in yet another new-style leadership convention in December 1992, the provincial capitol’s daily newspaper faked a major investigative series on oilfield cleanup. (Boychuk 2022b n9-10)

For many years after the oilpatch offensive that resulted from Alberta’s 2007 attempt to raise royalties, investigative journalist Mike De Souza did invaluable work at Canada’s problematic newspaper oligopoly.

As I recently demonstrated, De Souza’s Postmedia editors in Ottawa, Edmonton, and Calgary were spectacularly biased in their framing of very solid, but embarrassing reporting. (Boychuk 2023a)

More recently, Danielle Smith was tasked by Premier Jason Kenney with promoting the RStar Scam in July 2021. Less than a year later, Kenney resigned, and by October, Smith was premier despite all provincial media having a copy of a leaked letter authored by Smith and noting that Jason Kenney’s UCP government had approved the RStar Scam subsidy pilot in 2021, despite contrary official policy. (Boychuk 2023b)

In the fall of 2022, all it way to too late in February 2023, RStar was counted as just not done to mention.

The RStar scam

In June 2021, premier Jason Kenney announced “on July the first, on Canada Day, Alberta’s public health measures will be lifted and our lives will get back to normal.” (GoA 2021a 0:33-0:41) On July 2^nd, premier Jason Kenney tasked Danielle Smith with countering the Alberta Liability Disclosure Project’s report on the oilfield job-creation potential of the polluter pay principle. (ALDP 2021; Boychuk 2023b)

Smith spent the next year and half lobbying for the RStar scam, which Kenney’s UCP government had quietly approved shortly after the ALDP’s job report. (Smith 2021c p. 3)

After opening for summer and staying open through two increasingly unmitigated waves of Covic-19, ‘Alberta Premier Jason Kenney announced his government’s “path back to normal”’ after a surprise trip to Washington. Kenney’s plan included dropping mandatory masking for all kids in school beginning the next week — a “decision … made without the consultation of education stakeholders, including the association,” [Alberta Teachers’ Association] president Jason Schilling said. (CityNews 9/2/22)

Kenney ‘responded to the concerns of some teachers on Twitter, saying they should “treat kids like kids, not ‘unsafe’ vectors of transmission.”’ (CityNews 9/2/22)⁵⁰

A couple days later, Blair Fix publishes the first part of what would become a peer-reviewed study of Alberta oil and gas industry solvency under a wide range of future prices ($5-$500/bbl), using industry statistics & peer-reviewed profit methodology (Boychuk 2010b p. 11) + ALDP cleanup estimates the Alberta Energy Regulator itself has since conceded are accurate (as recently revealed in a hard-fought freedom-of-information request). (Fix 2022; Fix 2023; AER 2019d p. 2)

By the spring of 2022, Energy Minister Sonya Savage and Environment Minister Jason Nixon were racking up frequent-flyer miles. “I think you can expect to see an Alberta delegation of ministers down here in Washington at least every other month,” premier Kenney said a couple days before resigning. “I was here two months ago, they’re going to be here one month from now — we’re going to be really picking up the tempo of our presence here.”’ (CP 16/5/22; Kenney 2022b)

As it turned out, Danielle Smith was sworn in as premier on October 11^th 2022, mentioning the RStar scam the morning before and at her first press conference as premier. (Boychuk 2023b) Six weeks into America’s reasserted control over Alberta under Smith, Alberta schools were prevented from requiring masks or shifting to online learning. (CBC 24/11/22)⁵¹

Almost as if the prime conditions for the outbreak of epidemics had been deliberately created in Alberta schools. Again.

A class of sociopaths

The Fourth Order of society is small international class of sociopaths pursuing a suicidal path for the remainder of humanity. These violent and lawless imperialists, together with their assorted compradors and apologists, should be added as an international class to Adam Smith’s great, original constituent orders of every civilized society: rentiers, wage-earners, capitalists, and the imperialists who feed upon them amidst international lawlessness.

Together with an appreciation for white-collar criminology and the role of private debt in financial crises (Vague 2019 pp. 6-8), this Fourth Order explains much domestically attributed to uncoordinated stupidity or the mysteries of ‘The Market.’ Financial imperialism is the better explanation. (Sutherland 1949; Wheeler & Rothman 1982 pp. 1406, 1424; Hagan & Parker 1985; Akerlof & Romer 1993 p. 2; Black 2003 pp. 26, 31-35; Black 2005a; Black 2005b pp. 299-300; Black 2005c; Black 2005d pp. 5, 11 9-10; Black 2006 pp. 248-49; Black 2011; Carbone & Black 2020)

All our survival hinges on prying decision-making and resource rent from the Fourth Order’s grips. It won’t be fun.

As Freud lamented in 1930, “men are not gentle creatures … they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. … What a potent obstacle to civilization aggressiveness must be, if the defense against it can cause as much unhappiness as aggressiveness itself!” (Freud 1930 pp. 111, 143)⁵²

The climate fight’s existential nature, however, leaves us no choice but to vanquish the Fourth Order.

If we can accomplish the economic and environmental democracy the first three orders thought inevitable a century ago, it is almost certainly still possible for us to salvage a path to decent survival within earth’s all-too-real confines of time, energy, and waste.

Notes