whence many of those countries became enslaved to the bankers, and forced to follow their edicts on how to run their countries.

After 1971, a White House policy was initiated, under the effective control of Henry Kissinger, to control the economies of the nations and to reduce their populations, rather than to facilitate technology transfer and industrial growth. The strategy was to force the price of the cartelized world oil up by about a factor of four, recover the Arab oil receipts back into the British and American central banks, and lend them to the Third World to acquire control over those countries. To this end, the Bilderberg group, containing the world's top financial and political insiders, met privately in Saltsjoebaden, Sweden in May 1973 to discuss how the coming flood of oil dollars was to be handled. Mr. Engdahl lists many of the participants, including Kissinger, George Ball, David Rockefeller, and others. Then in October of that same year, the "Yom Kippur" war broke out, with Syria and Egypt invading Israel, with the U.S. supporting Israel, and the British staying demurely neutral. Kissinger performed his "shuttle diplomacy" among the participants, to assure the war followed the script previously worked out in Sweden. The Arab OPEC countries declared an embargo on all oil shipments to the U.S. and mainland Europe (but not Britain), and started cranking up the price, which rose by the scheduled factor of four by the end of the year. Nixon, drowning in the Watergate affair, tried to get the Treasury to find a way to get the Arabs to reduce their prices, but was rebuffed, and advised to support the "recycling" of the oil dollars at the current prices. Nixon agreed, and the deed was done. The great bulk of the petro-dollars were repatriated in purchasing U.S. government debt and in deposit accounts in Chase Manhattan, Citibank, et al. From there they were loaned to the Third World, which could not otherwise buy the fuel they needed to survive, whence many of those countries became enslaved to the bankers, and forced to follow their edicts on how to run their countries. Engdahl supplies lots more of the ghastly details.