You're listening to the Corbett Report.

High oil prices help ExxonMobil boost its profits to nearly 11 billion dollars in the latest quarter.

Shell is the latest oil company to report a big rise in profits thanks to higher oil prices.

The ability of the speculators to profit is surely dwarfed by the ability of oil producing nations to profit from a higher price of oil.

Maybe the easiest way for these guys to make the money, manipulate oil back above 50 even $60.

Oil.

From farm to pharmaceutical, diesel truck to dinner plate, pipeline to plastic product, it is impossible to think

of an area of our modern day lives that is not affected by the petrochemical industry.

The story of oil is the story of the modern world.

Parts of that story are well known.

Rockefeller and Standard Oil, the internal combustion engine and the transformation of global transport,

the House of Saad and the oil wars in the Middle East.

Other parts are more obscure.

The quest for oil in the outbreak of World War I, the petrochemical interests behind modern medicine,

the big oil money behind the green revolution and the gene revolution.

But that story, properly told, begins somewhere unexpected.

Not in Pennsylvania with the first commercial drilling operation in the first oil boom,

but in the rural backwoods of early 19th century New York state.

And it doesn't start with crude oil or its derivatives,

but a different product altogether.

Snake Oil.

Dr. Bill Livingston celebrated cancer specialist was the very image of the traveling snake oil salesman.

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