Rockefellers Seek Change at Exxon

Neva Rockefeller Goodwin and Peter O’Neill, descendants of John D. Rockefeller, are among those who want Exxon to shift priorities. Shareholders will vote Wednesday on four resolutions.

New York Times | May 27, 2008

By CLIFFORD KRAUSS

HOUSTON — The Rockefeller family built one of the great American fortunes by supplying the nation with oil. Now history has come full circle: some family members say it is time to start moving beyond the oil age.

The family members have thrown their support behind a shareholder rebellion that is ruffling feathers at Exxon Mobil, the giant oil company descended from John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust.

Three of the resolutions, to be voted on at the company’s shareholder meeting on Wednesday, are considered unlikely to pass, even with Rockefeller family support.

The resolutions ask Exxon to take the threat of global warming more seriously and look for alternatives to spewing greenhouse gases into the air.

One resolution would urge the company to study the impact of global warming on poor countries, another would encourage Exxon to reduce its emissions and a third would encourage it to do more research on renewable energy sources like solar panels and wind turbines.

A fourth resolution, which the Rockefellers are most united in supporting, is considered more likely to pass. It would strip Rex W. Tillerson of his position as chairman of Exxon’s board, forcing the company to separate that job from the chief executive’s job.

A shareholder vote in favor of that idea would be a rebuke of Mr. Tillerson, who is widely perceived as more resistant than other oil chieftains to investing in alternative energy.

The Rockefellers say they are not trying to embarrass Mr. Tillerson, also Exxon’s chief executive, but think it is time for the company to spend more of its funds helping the nation chart a new energy future.

“Exxon Mobil needs to reconnect with the forward-looking and entrepreneurial vision of my great-grandfather,” Neva Rockefeller Goodwin, a Tufts University economist, said in a statement to reporters.

“The truth is that Exxon Mobil is profiting in the short term from investments and decisions made many years ago, and by focusing on a narrow path that ignores the rapidly shifting energy landscape around the world,” she added.

The resolution on Exxon’s chairmanship was offered for several years before the Rockefellers became publicly involved and last year was supported by 40 percent of shareholders who voted. Royal Dutch Shell and BP already separate the positions of chairman and chief executive, as do many other companies.

“You need a board asking the tough questions,” Peter O’Neill, a private equity investor and great-great-grandson of John D. Rockefeller, said in an interview. “We expect the company to figure out how in this changing world to adjust.”

Kenneth P. Cohen, vice president for public affairs at Exxon, said the shareholders pushing the resolutions were “starting from a false premise.” He added that the company was already concerned about “how to provide the world the energy it needs while at the same time reducing fossil fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions.”

Fifteen members of the family are sponsoring or co-sponsoring the four resolutions, but it appears that some have much more solid support in the sprawling family than others.

Mr. O’Neill said that 73 out of 78 adult descendants of John D. Rockefeller were supporting the family effort to divide the chief executive and chairman positions. The goal of that resolution is to improve the management of the company, which could strengthen its environmental policies and improve more traditional pursuits like exploring more aggressively for new oil reserves.

David Rockefeller, retired chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank and patriarch of the family, issued a statement saying, “I support my family’s efforts to sharpen Exxon Mobil’s focus on the environmental crisis facing all of us.”

The Rockefeller family has always been identified with oil and the legacy of Standard Oil, but for several generations, it has also been active in environmental causes and acquiring land for preservation. John D. Rockefeller’s grandsons devoted themselves to conservation issues, and Rockefeller charitable organizations have long promoted efforts to fight pollution.

Ms. Goodwin, one of the most vocal Rockefellers on the environment today, is co-director of the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts.

In recent years, family members have quietly encouraged Exxon executives to take global warming seriously, but their private efforts did not go far. Until now, they have avoided publicity in their efforts, and the youngest Rockefeller generations have generally shunned attention.

Exxon executives said the company spent $2 billion over the last five years on programs to reduce emissions and improve efficiencies and had plans to spend $800 million on similar initiatives over the next three years. They said the company reduced the release of greenhouse gases from its operations last year by 3 percent, and it was working with Stanford to research biofuels and solar and hydrogen energy.

Since taking over the company two years ago, Mr. Tillerson has gradually shifted the company’s positions away from those of his predecessor, Lee R. Raymond, who was considered a skeptic on the science of global warming.

But with gasoline prices soaring and concern growing over global warming, Exxon, the biggest of the investor-owned oil companies, is a target for politicians and environmentalists. Chevron, BP and Shell, Exxon’s largest competitors, have given their investments in renewable fuels a much higher profile.

Similar or identical environmental proposals have not passed at previous Exxon shareholder meetings, but the public support of the Rockefeller family has given old efforts new energy.

The involvement of the Rockefellers, said Robert A. G. Monks, a shareholder who has been urging a separation of the chairman and chief executive jobs for years, shows that “this is not just a matter of the self-appointed good guys against the cavemen, but also a matter of the capitalists wanting to make money.”

Nineteen institutional investors with 91 million shares announced last week that they would support resolutions asking Exxon to separate the top executive positions and tackle global warming. They included the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the California State Teachers’ Retirement System and the New York City Employees’ Retirement System.

California’s treasurer, Bill Lockyer, who serves on the boards of the two California funds, said the company’s “go-slow approach” on global warming “places long-term shareholder value at risk.”

Under Exxon’s rules, a shareholder proposal that passes is not binding without the support of the board. But Andrew Logan, director of the oil program at Ceres, a coalition of institutional investors and environmentalists, said, “boards tend to strongly consider proposals that get significant support.”

Paul Sankey, an oil analyst at Deutsche Bank, said that he thought a separation of the chief executive and chairman jobs might be a good management move and that “we might see a mild benefit to Exxon’s public image.” But he added, “On balance, we wouldn’t expect any change in strategy.”

The Fraternal Order of Police, which represents public safety officers, whose pensions are invested in Exxon, has publicly opposed the shareholder effort to change company policy.

“The Rockefeller resolution threatens to degrade the value of Exxon Mobil,” the organization wrote in a letter to Mr. Tillerson that criticized the splitting of the top executive jobs.

Related

CEO to Face Rockefellers, Nuns in Exxon Meeting Showdown

Child abuse by UN peacekeepers and aidworkers rife

The study found a huge range of exploitation and abuse: children trading sex for food, forced sex, verbal sexual abuse, child prostitution, child pornography, sexual slavery, sexual assault and child trafficking.

U.N. peacekeepers were identified as the most likely perpetrators by 20 of the 38 groups, although a total of 23 humanitarian, peacekeeping and security organizations were associated with sexual abuse in the three countries.

Reuters | May 26, 2008

by David Clarke

LONDON (Reuters) – Sexual abuse of children by aid workers and peacekeepers is rife and efforts to protect young people are inadequate, said a report published on Tuesday.

The study by charity Save the Children UK said there were significant levels of abuse in emergencies, much of it unreported and unless the silence ended, attempts to stamp out exploitation would “remain fundamentally flawed.”

Accusations of sexual abuse by U.N. peacekeepers and aid workers around the world have increased in recent years and the United Nations is investigating claims against its soldiers in hotspots such as Haiti, Liberia, Ivory Coast and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The report said while the U.N. and some non-governmental organizations were stepping up efforts to address the problem, a global watchdog should be established this year to monitor attempts to tackle abuse and champion effective responses.

Save the Children based its findings on visits last year to Haiti, Southern Sudan and Ivory Coast. It held 38 focus group discussions with 250 children and 90 adults, followed up by in-depth interviews with some and desk-based research.

The study found a huge range of exploitation and abuse: children trading sex for food, forced sex, verbal sexual abuse, child prostitution, child pornography, sexual slavery, sexual assault and child trafficking.

The focus groups identified children as young as six as having been abused, although most were aged 14 to 15.

U.N. peacekeepers were identified as the most likely perpetrators by 20 of the 38 groups, although a total of 23 humanitarian, peacekeeping and security organizations were associated with sexual abuse in the three countries.

“All humanitarian and peacekeeping agencies working in emergency situations, including Save the Children UK, must own up to the fact that they are vulnerable to this problem and tackle it head on,” said Jasmine Whitbread, chief executive of Save the Children UK.

YOUNG GIRLS

More than half of the participants in the study identified incidents of sexual touching and forced sex. Of these, 18 and 23 percent respectively recalled 10 or more such incidents.

“They especially ask us for girls of our age. Often it will be between eight and 10 men who will share two or three girls. When I suggest an older girl, they say that they want a young girl,” a 14-year-old boy who works at a peacekeeping camp in Ivory Coast told the Save the Children research team.

And the report said official U.N. statistics appeared to underestimate the scale of abuse, probably because so much of the exploitation was not reported by victims.

“Clearly there is a significant disparity between the low levels of abuse cited in these statistics and the high levels suggested in field investigations and other evidence,” it said.

Save the Children said there were many reasons why abuse was not reported: fear of losing material assistance, threat of retribution, stigmatization, negative economic impact, lack of legal services, resignation to abuse, lack of information about how to report abuse and, crucially, lack of faith in a response.

Anecdotal evidence from all 38 focus groups suggested there was an endemic failure to respond to reports of abuse.

“Many U.N. agencies and NGOs working here feel they cannot be touched by anyone,” said an aid worker in Ivory Coast.

Bereaved Chinese parents to be given licenses to replace children killed in earthquake

Relatives grieve over the photo of a child killed in an earthquake at the Fuxin No.2 Primary School in Wufu, in China’s southwest Sichuan province Friday May 23, 2008. Parents of the 200 children who died when the school collapsed in an earthquake on May 12 are demanding an investigation into alleged shoddy construction. (AP Photo/Greg Baker)

1-child policy has exceptions after China quake

By CARA ANNA

Associated Press | May 26, 2008

BEIJING – Chinese officials said Monday that the country’s one-child policy exempts families with a child killed, severely injured or disabled in the country’s devastating earthquake.

Those families can obtain a certificate to have another child, the Chengdu Population and Family Planning Committee in the capital of hard-hit Sichuan province said.

With so many shattered families asking questions, the Chengdu committee is clarifying existing one-child policy guidelines, said a committee official surnamed Wang.

“There are just a lot of cases now, so we need to clarify our policies,” said Wang, who declined to elaborate.

The May 12 quake was particularly painful to many Chinese because it killed so many only children.

The earthquake has left more than 65,000 people so far, with more than 23,000 missing. Officials have not been able to estimate the number of children killed.

Chinese couples who have more than one child are commonly punished by fines. The announcement says that if a child born illegally was killed in the quake, the parents will no longer have to pay fines for that child — but the previously paid fines won’t be refunded.

If the couple’s legally born child is killed and the couple is left with an illegally born child under the age of 18, that child can be registered as the legal child — an important move that gives the child previously denied rights including free nine years of compulsory education.

China’s one-child policy was launched in the late 1970s to control China’s exploding population and ensure better education and health care. The law includes certain exceptions for ethnic groups, rural families and families where both parents are only children.

The government says the policy has prevented an additional 400 million births, but critics say it has also led to forced abortions, sterilizations and a dangerously imbalanced sex ratio as local authorities pursue sometimes severe birth quotas set by Beijing and families abort girls out of a traditional preference for male heirs.

Though commonly called a one-child policy, the rules offer a welter of exceptions and loopholes, some of them put into practice because of widespread opposition to the limits.

For example, in large parts of rural China, most families are allowed a second-child, especially if the first was a girl. Local officials often have wide discretion on enforcement, a fact that has made the policy susceptible to corruption.

Many Chinese have shown interest in adopting earthquake orphans, and Monday’s announcement says there are no limits on the number of earthquake orphans a family can adopt. The adoptions, or even a future birth to a family that adopts an orphan, will not face the limitations of the one-child policy.

Officials estimated last week that the quake left about 4,000 orphans, but they warned they would make every effort to connect children with other family members.

The Chemical Dumbing Down of America

“The Order’s [Masonic Illuminati] working and involvement in America is immense. The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes.”

– U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, 1952

Why is America so brainwashed by the corporate media? Why do we care more about American Idol and sports games than being poisoned with mercury in our vaccinations and sodium fluoride in our water supply? America needs to wake up and get the facts about our chemical manipulation before it’s too late.

Music: Pink Floyd – Sheep, Us and Them

The Task of Unifying the World Mind

Knowledge Driven Revolution | May 26, 2008

UNESCO Its Purpose and Its Philosophy Part 2

By Brent Jessop

As the first Director of UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation), Sir Julian Sorell Huxley (1887-1975) wrote a paper entitled UNESCO Its Purpose and Its Philosophy (1946) [1] in which he outlined his vision for the newly created international organisation (which grew out of the League of Nations’ Institute of Intellectual Co-operation). According to Huxley, the guiding philosophy of UNESCO should be what he termed, World Evolutionary Humanism. The previous article in this series described this philosophy and its relation to eugenics. This article will outline the purpose of UNESCO, which is to mentally prepare the world for global political unification under a single world government. It will also introduce the broad reach of tools and techniques at UNESCO’s disposal under the banners of Education, Science and Culture.

Julian Huxley, an evolutionary biologist, humanist, and ardent internationalist held many titles including: Secretary of the Zoological Society of London (1935-42), first president of the British Humanist Association (1963), Vice-President (1937-44) and President (1959-62) of the British Eugenics Society. He was also a founding member of the World Wild Life Fund, coined the term “transhumanism” (as a means of disguising eugenics) and gave two Galton memorial lectures (1936, 1962). Huxley also received many awards including the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society (1956), UNESCO’s Kalinga Prize (1953) and the Special Award of the Lasker Foundation in the category Planned Parenthood – World Population (1959) to name but a few. He is also the Grandson of Thomas Huxley (Darwin’s Bulldog) and brother of author Aldous Huxley.

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Orwellian Ubiquitous Computing May Build Ultimate Surveillance Society

Old-Thinker News | May 26, 2008

By Daniel Taylor

“…just by walking down the street you could be subject to a personal biometric system, you could be scanned by the gateway of the transit system, there could be something embedded in the street or in the flooring beneath you… you could be touching other tangible interfaces in the environment around you… the lamp posts and the other features of the streetscape could have informational services… and last but not least there’s the surveillance element, there’s a UAV, a robotic helicopter which is also surveying the cityscape and communicating with all of these devices… This is really what I mean by a transformation of the relationship between user and device. This person is not a user anymore in any real sense of the English world, they are a subject.”

It may seem like a vision of a distant science fiction world, but this scenario laid out by Adam Greenfield, author of “Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing”, could be just around the corner. In fact, at this very moment in South Korea an entire city, a “U-city”, is being built that utilizes ubiquitous technology. It had it’s first test run in March of last year. Several other countries are currently planning, or are currently building cities modeled around South Korea’s U-city.

What exactly is Ubiquitous Computing?

An “Everyware” world, as Adam Greenfield calls it, is a world in which computers are embedded and merged seamlessly everywhere in the environment. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags communicate their position and other information constantly in a vast network. Everyday objects become “searchable” as if they were part of the interconnected world wide web. Surveillance in an “Everyware” world is perfected to a degree that is unimaginable. Scientific management of people and the environment we inhabit becomes possible, and marketers’ ultimate dreams come true.

Watch this clip as Adam Greenfield explains ubiquitous computing (skip ahead to 1:30 to hear his explanation)

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The Real Life Ministry Of Love Is Being Built

“I believe that if the people of this nation fully understood what Congress has done to them over the last 49 years, they would move on Washington; they would not wait for an election. It adds up to a preconceived plan to destroy the economic and social independence of the United States.”

– George W. Malone, U.S. Senator (Nevada), speaking before Congress in 1957.

Rogue Governent | May 24, 2008

By Lee Rogers

The federal government is continuing the incremental agenda to build a Ministry of Love styled detention camp system for the American people. According to a report from the Los Angeles Times, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency or ICE is building three new detention camps in the United States. The detention facilities will be minimum-security residential facilities that the federal government says will be used to house illegal aliens. Considering that the majority of the American people are against illegal immigration and just want immigrants to come into the country legally, most people will believe that this is a reasonable step to solve the illegal immigration problem. Unfortunately, this is really nothing more than a phony solution to solve a problem that has been created by government policies that have been implemented to encourage the illegal alien problem.

The federal government is using the illegal immigration problem as an excuse to build the detention camp apparatus that is really meant for the American people. This is pretty obvious considering Rex 84, the Army’s Civilian Inmate Labor Program, the preservation of detention camps for Japanese Americans used during World War II and additional detention facilities built by KBR. Building a series of detention facilities is not going to resolve the illegal immigration problem with an administration that has supported policies to ensure as many illegal aliens enter the country as possible. As the economy unravels and as more and more people begin to protest against this criminal government, the establishment will need these detention facilities to lock up large numbers of Americans.

Recently in Waterloo Iowa, the federal government through ICE and FEMA built a temporary detention facility on the National Cattle Congress fairgrounds to round up a group of illegal aliens working in the area. Rounding up a few hundred illegal aliens does absolutely nothing to reverse the long standing policies that created the illegal immigration problem in the first place. In fact, all they are doing to the illegal aliens they round up is to process them through their temporary FEMA camp. This is clearly not an effective way to stop illegal immigration. Under the guise of solving the illegal immigration issue they are simply having their people go through the motions in order to practice the deployment of a FEMA camp and the processing of live test subjects through the FEMA camp.

According to a report from Radar Magazine, top secret continuity of government operations includes a database called Main Core which contains a list of 8 million Americans. During a national emergency, people in this database could be arrested and detained by government authorities. In 2007, George W. Bush signed National Security Presidential Directive 51 which gives the president authority over all three branches of government during a catastrophic emergency. The Bush administration has also refused to reveal details on specific details of continuity of government operations to the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee. Perhaps the Main Core database and the plans to round up American citizens listed in this database during a national emergency is one of the reasons why they are keeping these details secret.

FEMA has also announced that they are expanding a program to transport a large number of American citizens using trains during an emergency. This is the same method that the Nazis used to transport large numbers of Jews and political dissidents to their death camps.

At the very least, the federal government is setting up some sort of Orwellian Ministry of Love system with these FEMA camps. In George Orwell’s book 1984, thought criminals were taken away to the Ministry of Love where they were re-educated to love Big Brother. These FEMA camps would serve as suitable places for the federal government to take away political dissidents and protesters. If Radar Magazine’s report on the Main Core database is accurate, this makes the possibility that these FEMA camps will be used for such a purpose quite real. Top this off with the fact that S 1959 the Homegrown Terrorism and Violent Radicalization Act of 2007 gives the federal government a blank check to establish various think tanks and commissions to study and target people who have certain belief systems under the guise of fighting terrorism and it becomes even scarier. The U.S. House of Representatives has already passed their version of the bill by a vote of 404-6. The U.S. Senate Homeland Security Committee has come out with a report suggesting that new legislation should be passed to deal with homegrown terrorism and the adoption of so called radical ideology. What better way to deal with people who have certain belief systems than to put them in FEMA camps that will be used for the purposes of re-education?

It is no secret that the Bush administration has maintained a policy that endorses torture. The 81 page torture memo that was authored by former Deputy Attorney General John Yoo is proof that the administration sought to justify torture using the phony terror war as cover. There’s little doubt that they are attempting to socially engineer the general public to accept torture as an acceptable practice. If they are successful in doing this, they will undoubtedly utilize these practices in any sort of Ministry of Love styled re-education camp system.

At the very worst, the federal government is setting up these FEMA camps as a way to exterminate large numbers of people. The elites of the world are obsessed with population reduction and these FEMA camps could easily be used to kill a large number of people.

These actions by the federal government should be of the utmost concern to the American people. The executive branch is being incredibly secret about continuity of government operations, there is legislation pending that will give the government a blank check to label particular belief systems as homegrown terrorism, the administration has written memos justifying the use of torture, they are maintaining a database of people who they’d round up during a national emergency and they are increasing the number of government run detention centers. As the economy continues to unravel and as more and more people become unhappy with the criminals and tyrants that have taken over the government, there is a very good chance that the ever growing martial law apparatus could be used on the people. This apparatus that they are setting up could be as bad if not worse than the Ministry of Love as depicted in George Orwell’s book 1984.