by Gerard Colby
However, if they were hoping for family unity at the shareholders meetings, they were disappointed. Nelson Rockefeller Jr. and Mark Rockefeller, the younger sons of Nelson Rockefeller and his second wife “Happy,” were conspicuously absent from the roster of signers. So were three of the four children of Nelson’s conservative son Rodman: Michael S. Rockefeller, Meile Louise Rockefeller, and Peter Clark Rockefeller (although brother Stuart signed). Nelson’s grandson Steven Rockefeller Jr. did not sign, although his sister Jennifer and Aunt Mary did. George Dorr O’Neill Jr., son of Abby Rockefeller O’Neill, did not sign, unlike his sister Abby M. O’Neill and his brother Peter M. O’Neill, one of the leaders of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s later planned disinvestment from fossil fuels. None of Winthrop Rockefeller or Laurance Rockefeller’s families signed, despite Laurance’s daughter-in-law Wendy Gordon Rockefeller’s stated concerns for the environment.
Their resolution was soundly defeated.29
Moving beyond this embarrassment, the Rockefeller cousins then announced in September 2014, that they had no choice but to publicly withdraw their support for ExxonMobil’s fossil fuel policy and divest their ExxonMobil stocks.
ExxonMobil, led by CEO Rex Tillerson, denied any intentional wrongdoing when confronted with subsequent investigations by the attorneys general of New York and California, claiming its questioning of scientists’ warnings was before the evidence was conclusive, insisting that “climate science was in an early stage of development,” according to emails from Exxon spokesman Alan Jeffers to CBS MoneyWatch.30 In January 2017, at his carefully watched confirmation hearings to be Trump’s secretary of state, Tillerson cautiously acknowledged that climate change was real, but that the threat it posed was still unclear.31
President Trump’s choice of the CEO of the most powerful oil company in the world put to rest any doubts that oil and American foreign policy are inextricably linked (and indeed have been since the term “oleaginous diplomacy” in Washington, DC, emerged in the aftermath of World War I).32 By 2015, with $349.49 billion in assets generating $21.96 billion in net income, Tillerson’s ExxonMobil was truly a force to be reckoned with as the world’s largest oil refiner, largest of the super-major energy companies, and Fortune 500’s second most profitable corporation in the world.33
The Russian Connection
Rex Tillerson has played a major role in advancing ExxonMobil into Eastern Siberia. He and Vladimir Putin struck a deal in 2011 when ExxonMobil entered into joint development projects in the Tuapse field in the northeast Black Sea and the East-Prinovozemelsky field in the far-north Kara Sea.34 ExxonMobil’s partner in these projects was Rosneft, the state-owned Russian oil company with close ties to Putin. The partnership was working so well that the following year, Rosneft struck another agreement with Tillerson to have ExxonMobil assess the prospect of producing “tight” oil locked in Western Siberia’s shale formations.35 After a massive oil discovery by ExxonMobil in Russia, however, Tillerson lost all four promising projects when the Obama administration imposed sanctions on Rosneft in retaliation for Russia’s annexation of the strategic Crimea and its backing of an ethnic Russian separatist movement in northeastern Ukraine.36 ExxonMobil’s loss from the sanctions imposed by the Obama administration could amount to one billion dollars unless the Trump administration, including Tillerson now as secretary of state, reverses Obama’s policy.
Although Rockefeller family members are absent from the board of ExxonMobil, this does not mean they are not investing in oil,37 including oil in the former Soviet Union. Indeed, one member of the Rockefeller family who has chosen not to challenge ExxonMobil’s positions on climate change at its annual meetings is Nelson’s grandson, Steven Rockefeller Jr. Young Rockefeller has quietly formed his own oil company and is investing heavily in Russia’s Western Siberia.
On July 5, 2012, he incorporated Rockefeller Oil Company and on February 17, 2014, was joined on this company’s board by Dietrich Wilhelm Prinz von Erbach-Schönberg, a direct heir to the Erbach-Schönberg fortune, one of the oldest in Europe. Together, they had Rockefeller Oil buy 100 percent of one of Russia’s largest oil and gas companies, the giant Techneftinvesta, with over 180 million tons of oil reserves and 20 billion cubic meters of natural gas, so large, in fact, that private Russian oil firms backed off, leaving the field to Steven’s $1 billion bid.
With unnamed collateral, Steven arranged this huge financing through Russia’s VTB Bank,38 bankrupting Techneftinvesta’s major creditor to the tune of $291 million in debt. This deal made Steven Rockefeller Jr. one of the largest owners of Russian oil and gas.
Steven’s sister, Valerie, who chairs the board of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, is married to Steven Wayne, a major investor in real estate in St. Peterburg.39
This experience within the former Soviet empire was shared by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s former president Stephen Heintz. In 1990, Heintz became director of the Institute for East-West Studies’ European Studies Center in Prague, Czechoslovakia. With the help of Douglas Bennet, President Clinton’s former head of the State Department’s Agency for International Development (AID), Heintz landed the job in time to witness the revolts in Soviet-controlled Central and Eastern Europe.40 Heintz made his way back to New York and to the Rockefeller Brothers Fund in 2000, thanks to grants to his Prague center by the Fund. Working under David Rockefeller’s son, Richard Gilder Rockefeller, Heintz oversaw RBF’s growth as its endowment increased from corporate investments during the stock market boom of 2001–2006.
In 2006, David Rockefeller gave RBF another $225 million to launch the David Rockefeller Global Development Fund, ballooning the RBF endowment to well over $860 million.
Despite the triumphalism he felt when the Soviet Union collapsed (a feat attributed largely to Zbigniew Brzezinski),41 David had to reconcile himself with certain realities, including the survival of Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba and the emergence of popularly elected, progressive governments in Brazil, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia during the Middle East–centric administration of George W. Bush.42 These countries’ rejection of foreign control over their destinies, to the point of electing to form their own trade blocks—such as the so-called BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China)—has kept David’s Council of the Americas busy in casting doubts on their viability.43
In Brazil, conservative politicians actually facing legal charges of corruption were able to launch a successful “democratic” regime change to impeach and remove President Lula da Silva’s successor, President Dilma Rousseff, on charges of budgetary manipulation. Rousseff’s successor, Michel Temer, immediately pushed for austerity cuts including the minimum wage for pensioners. But even Temer has been snared in Brazil’s widening corruption scandal, having been caught on tapes demanding bribes—charges similar to those which have already landed in jail his ally who led the impeachment campaign against Rousseff in the Brazilian Congress’s lower house, former speaker Eduardo Cunha.44
With the return to power of new-liberalism to Brazil has come renewed assaults on the Brazilian Amazon and its indigenous tribes. In August 2017, a group of gold miners went on a murderous rampage against ten members of an uncontacted tribe. They were later overheard boasting in a bar about cutting up their bodies and tossing them into the river. Reported the New York Times, “federal prosecutors in Brazil have opened an investigation into the reported massacre. … The latest evidence that threats to endangered indigenous groups are on the rise in the country.” Funding for the protection of Indians has been slashed under Temer as he seeks “support from powerful agricultural, ranching and mining lobbies to push economic changes through Congress and shelter him from a corruption investigation.”45
As with Venezuela, so with Brazil, the Council of the Americas has weighed in on the side of the conservative opposition.46 James Naylor Green, author of We Cannot Remain Silent: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in the United States, in 2016 foresaw the
Brazilian senators’ “coup” as part of a plan that had been “articulated by sectors of the opposition”—to “eliminate the president from her office; then to find a way to make Lula, President Lula, ineligible for election in 2018 to the presidency; then to install a neoliberal economic policy.”47 In July 2017, Green’s predictions were borne out: Lula was convicted of corruption and money laundering and sentenced to more than nine years in prison, a move described by the Washington Post as “a stunning blow to a man once hailed across the hemisphere as an innovative leftist leader. … The verdict represents a major setback for the popular leader’s political aspirations.” Lula remains a free man while appealing the verdict.48 The Brazilian people, meanwhile, have been left “exhausted,” according to Intercept columnist Glenn Greenwald, “by endless corruption scandals and contemptuous of the entire political class.”49
David Rockefeller did not live to see a hoped-for downfall of the leftist former president, and his Council of the Americas (COA) was cautious with its predictions following the verdict. “For Brazil’s Lula, It’s Not Over Yet,” wrote COA Quarterly editor Brian Winter:
The 71-year-old former labor leader oversaw a long economic boom from 2003 to 2010, and left office with an approval rating of almost 90 percent. While tarnished since then by Brazil’s economic collapse and the Car Wash [corruption] case, Lula remains a folk hero to many. He leads polls for elections next October, and is rising as some Brazilians hunger for a return to the stability and prosperity of the 2000s, ethics be damned50
Predictably, David’s Memoirs reflected his long-held belief that capitalism would triumph over all, noting at the end that he was still convinced that “the ability to make profits is a critical element in society’s progress.”51 Just before David’s death, however, Richard Haass, current president of the Council on Foreign Relations, published a book with the unsettling title, A World in Disarray. It describes how rules that have guided the world since World War II “have largely run their course” and that “the gap between the challenges generated by globalization and the ability of the world to cope with them appears to be widening.”52
Trilateral Commission cofounder Zbigniew Brzezinski, who died three months after David on May 27, 2017, was equally wary when he decided in April 2016 to put the past four centuries—centuries, which in fact correspond with the birth and expansion of corporate capitalism—under a more discerning microscope in order to understand the startling upsurge of worldwide discontent against corporate globalization. In an article appearing in The American Interest, he provided an extraordinary recitation of crimes against humanity, or as he calls it, “the slaughter of colonized people” brought on by Western European (and US) powers.
As one of the “national security” theoreticians of the upper class 1 percent, Brzezinski was forced to face an inescapable and potentially dangerous reality: “In today’s postcolonial world, a new historical narrative is emerging. A profound resentment against the West and its colonial legacy in Muslim countries and beyond is being used to justify their sense of deprivation and denial of self-dignity.”53
This could be interpreted as a way of saying that the time has come for the world’s rulers to update their political inoculations against spreading revolution to include the race for global development before time runs out.
One of the world’s more prescient billionaires, Amazon.com investor Nick Hanauer caused a sensation with his 2014 essay in Politico entitled “The Pitchforks Are Coming … For Us Plutocrats” He warned “fellow zillionaires” that “if we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out.”54
Neither Brzezinski nor Hanauer, nor, for that matter, the fourth and fifth generations of the Rockefeller dynasty, seemed willing to discuss how corporate capitalism per se has played a role in a worldwide upsurge of anger, whether a new economic system is needed, or that a new system might grow out of the old and what it might look like. For now, as long as the profits continue to roll in, the painful process of reassessing corporate capitalism and the power of its elites seems to have been put on hold.
But reassessment cannot be indefinitely delayed. The world is becoming too educated and too informed by the internet, as Mr. Brzezinski pointed out in his 2010 address to the Council on Foreign Relations:
[A] major change in international affairs is that for the first time in all of human history ... people know what is generally going on in the world and are consciously aware of global iniquities, inequalities, lack of respect, exploitation. ... Mankind is now politically awakened and staring. ... The diversified global leadership [and] politically awakened masses, makes a much more difficult context for any major power including, currently, the leading world power, the United States.
David Rockefeller, in his later years, set about restoring the image of the first three generations of Rockefellers as wise stewards of wealth and generous givers of money. This image, carefully cultivated for decades by the Rockefeller family offices at Rockefeller Center and the family foundations, had been tainted in 1969 when Nelson, envoy of newly inaugurated President Richard Nixon, was greeted with riots and pelted with rocks and tomatoes during his “goodwill tour” of Latin America. Then came the embarrassing revelation of details of the family’s finances in 1973 during Nelson’s confirmation as vice president of the United States.55 David disclosed in his Memoirs that he was determined to reverse what he called “the dismal decades”56 of the 1960s and ’70s—the very period chronicled in Thy Will Be Done on Nelson Rockefeller’s impact on our southern neighbors.
In 1994, David Rockefeller donated one million dollars to Harvard University to set up the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. Its aim was to “increase knowledge of the cultures, economies, histories, environment, and contemporary affairs of past and present Latin America.” Rockefeller pledged to give another ten million dollars over time.
In 2010, in anticipation of his ninety-fifth birthday, David Rockefeller was heralded by Poder magazine as a “Lion of the Americas.” According to the magazine’s Facebook page, Poder (which, intriguingly, is Spanish for “power”) is a magazine with extraordinary clout: “the premier Hispanic business publication for U.S. Hispanic/Latino leaders, entrepreneurs and decision makers” with a focus on “intelligence for the business elite.”
Poder’s tribute predictably gave the business elite’s point of view on David’s impact on Latin America, with Nelson’s decades-long involvement in all conceivable aspects of Latin American life reduced to one sentence mentioning his service as secretary of state for Latin America during World War II:
Few if any individuals have had a greater personal impact in the Americas than David Rockefeller, whose lifelong interest has contributed significantly to building a regional policy framework that promotes democracy, open markets, and the rule of law. Latin America has been in the Rockefeller family DNA since early in the last century, from his grandfather’s well-known and documented commercial interests to older brother Nelson Rockefeller’s service as the first Assistant Secretary of State for the region. Later on, nephew Rodman Rockefeller took an active leadership role of the Mexico-U.S. … [After] World War II, David Rockefeller launched the next phase of his life by going to work for Chase bank and leading its expansion throughout the hemisphere.57
What the 2010 Poder tribute to David did not anticipate, however, was a sudden and dramatic shift in world public opinion against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that David, above all businessmen, promoted into law. This shift in opinion came to a head during the Obama administration, when the much-promised fruits of corporate globalization began to turn sour as corporations shuttered factories in the American homeland and moved to cheap labor and growing consumer markets abr
oad in countries like China.
Until his death, David kept in touch with what was going on in the world. He retained honorary board titles at the Council on Foreign Relations (which hosts the Studies Office he oversaw for years and now bears his name), the Council of the Americas/Americas Society, and the Trilateral Commission. He still owned a summer home on Mount Desert Island, Maine; a luxury apartment at Manhattan’s East 65th Street; his late wife’s farm in Livingston, New York; a 4,000-acre resort in the Virgin Islands, a 15,500-acre sheep ranch in Argentina, and a cattle ranch in Argentina. His main residence was “Hudson Pines,” the family’s Pocantico estate overlooking the Hudson where he died. At sylvan Pocantico, David’s portrait hangs in what had been the Playhouse for him, his brothers, and his sister. He is depicted in a World War II army captain’s uniform. Portraits of his older brothers John III, Laurance, and Winthrop also hang here, resplendent in their service uniforms proudly worn during World War II—but there is no picture of a uniformed Nelson due to his civilian status as the coordinator of inter-American affairs and assistant secretary of state for Latin America.
Yet, if David owed most to any of his brothers, it was to Nelson. It was Nelson who urged David to found Chase Bank’s Latin American division, whose success contributed, along with his family’s stockholdings, to David’s rise in the bank. It was Nelson who first pushed for economic integration of the Americas during the 1960 presidential campaign and stimulated David’s founding of the Council of the Americas a few years later—an initiative that eventually found fruition after Nelson’s death by David’s push in Congress and the Clinton White House for NAFTA. It was Nelson who, as New York governor, brought crucial state office rentals to the World Trade Center promoted by David. It was Nelson who brought Henry Kissinger into David’s life as a trusted confidante and friend. It was Nelson who encouraged the founding of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund during World War II and brought the brothers into the secret world of Cold War intelligence, including David’s friendship with CIA Director Allen Dulles. It was Nelson who offered to make David a US senator by appointing him to the Senate seat made empty by Sen. Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination (David declined). Finally, it was Nelson, the family bully, who—as usual—got his way in his demands on David and his brothers over the use of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund in “soft” intelligence. David, who writes extensively about Nelson’s efforts to control the RBF, describes his brother as “ever the hard charger, [who] refused to be bridled.” 58
