Comments (20)

I keep hearing about the benefits of finding "domestic oil". Can someone please explain to me whether in this age of global energy companies, there is any such thing. If Exxon finds oil in the Arctic or off New Jersey, who owns it? Who decides where it will be sold and at what price? Where does "American oil" go currently? Wouldn't we have to nationalize the oil companies in order to truly have ownership of oil discovered in our territory? I've been looking for a website that might explain some of this. Thanks

Broken Record, but here I go again:

Raise the Carbon/Oil/Gas Tax!

Pay ourselves, not them.

Use the funds for infrastructure, finding alternate fuels, nukes, mass transit, and provide relief to those individuals and businesses that really need it.

Trillion$ to them, or back to us?

Hey let's just let china move in and gobble up all the oil...That will show us.

GREAT IDEA FOLKS!!!

People like G.L. (George) Kirkland are the real criminals in this country. I hope he can sleep at night knowing that he countibuted to the deaths of over 4,000 Americans and 1 million Iraqi civilians to satisfy his oil lust. Kirkland's behavior even shames satan.

And finally the cat is out of the bag

" The trick, as with prizes in so many other politically sensitive countries, is getting hold of the prize".

There is no "trick", just the most ferocious barbarism. If you don't get hold of the prize get your salesmen-HOGs (Heads of Governments and of States who, in a globalised world,have become petty salesment for the mega-corporations) to "bomb them back to the stone age".

How could anyone keep an American from a dollar? Such an act would be indecent. Let us thank all of those Americans, allies and Iraqis who have died to enable American Oil the right to make a buck.

this is the work of real journalism Please keep reporting on this important issue.

jhbyer said:
Iraqis have proved too smart for Big Oil.
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Haha, you're right.

Or for long term bases. The administration is trying everything that has already been done before and proven to fail.

I think it is sick to be talking about "prizes" while there are still 2 million refugees and still soldiers on the ground dying.

If we continue to elect idiots, they will continue to run the country like idiots. Osama Bin Laden was in Afghanistan. We attacked Afghanistan but let Osama Bin Laden escape. Then, before we had secured Afghanistan, we pulled most of our troops and sent them to Iraq to steal the oil. Today, on the the very same page as this report about oil contracts, is news about new attacks by the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan. All thanks to Georgie Jr., the commander guy. And we thought Nixon and Reagan were losers! Does anyone really think John McBush will clean up this mess ???

The Iraq oil contracts are NO BID contracts. NO BID. How is it Mr. Mufson ignores the fact that this is virtually unprecedented in the world oil business? How is it that Mr. Mufson ignores how Cheney's secret energy policy task force mapped out the plot for these same major oil company's takeover of Iraq's reserves in consequence of the American occupation? How is it that Mr. Mufson seems oblivious about how the rest of the world sees these contracts -- as merely a coldly logical next step of American imperialism following our Cheney's policy of "blood for oil"? It was all about oil, wasn't it? All those American and Iraqi deaths, just for oil. All that agony, chaos, disruption, migration, pain, blood and sorry, all for oil. If the Post let's a oily commentator use up space on this blog, let's at least have honesty and competence.

Impeach Cheney first lest he bomb Iran and make things even worse.

I am like every other American caught in this $4 dollar-plus gasoline quandry. I do not care WHO or WHAT is manipulating my micro-economic reality here in my wallet, I just want it to stop. Now. Who is the bad guy and who is the good guy is not relevant when food prices are skyrocketing and oil prices are reaching unaffordable prices for the working class American. Who is to blame? I simply don't care. I just want the high tech robbery to stop. If there is something, anything the typical American can do to stop the madness here, somebody PLEASE lay out the plan.

CWO3 Tom Barnes, USCG (Ret.)

The oil companies are lying about the supply, and are engaged in illegal price fixing. AP report: Saudi officials have noted that soaring prices have not been caused by a shortage of supply.

While Saudi Arabia has been reluctant to drastically increase production, it has announced several small increases recently that it says were made to satisfy increased customer demand. The country has consistently said that it will produce enough oil to ensure the market is supplied.

we have the technological capacity to be energy self sufficient. if iceland can do it, so can we. the oil companies are screwing us and interfering with our prosperity.

Keep reporting. What are those unspecified or unnamed targets? Fill in the detail and keep us abreast.

The head of BP who went to the same university as me said in an interview with Cam, our alumnae rag, that Bush and Blair's invason of Iraq was all about oil......... He should know, after all BP was behind the previous takeover of Iraq as well..... by the Brits during the first world war, almost a hundred years ago.

When Churchill wanted to pull our soldiers out a few years later when he was loosing too many men, the then Prime Minister was sympathetic but refused his request......because Iraq was too full of oil!!!! ..... DEJA VU ?????

Iraqis have proved too smart for Big Oil.

Commentators seem our truest measure of a free press. They (we) are the ones who unabashedly dare say that we're in Iraq to colonize, not liberate. That's why we're buillding permanent military bases all over the country, paying off people left and right at the cost of billions of unaccounted for money, and tens of thousands of mangled veterans and their families.
And the press mumbles and Congress bumbles. The only near term hope I have is to elect a Progressive Congress,trusting to Move On, Emily's List, America Votes et al and not either of our great political parties.

Well, well, well. And then we had the quietly signed oil contracts just months after our invasion.

So now let's look at the whole mid-East from the new perspective we now have. The mid-East is the playground of the Exxon Mobile, BP, etc., among the greatest criminals against humanity the world has yet known. See Amnesty International. See Wikepedia on BP! Now, we have said internationally incorporated criminal organizations embedded in the Congress, the dot com industry, and the media. The media owners make the products they advertise, and own the advertising industries. Oil drives it all.

Then we have tiny Israel, smaller than New Jersey, which is the big bad bogeyman of the MIddle East. Interesting. Oh, and why do we "support" it? (Let's say for a minute we do, forgetting our forcing Arafat down its throat, forcing them to give aid to the trapped Egyptian third army that was attacking them, etc.; Let's forget the five billion we give Egypt every year that the pig Mubarak never gives to starving Egyptians)

Oh. We Support Israel because it is a democracy. So we support it because it shares the same principles we do?!!! Can anyone actually believe this? We "support" it because it has a stable government that we can manipulate.
This is what we thought we'd get in Iraq. WRONG.

No. No powerful mysterious Zionists either. Just the Christians, CAtholics, and Muslims of OPEC, BP, Exxon. MPAC You know. The ones who have you waiting at the gas lines. You know, the ones who make you wonder about your grocery bills, you know, you know, you know.

"Four Western oil companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power.

Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP — the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company — along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies, are in talks with Iraq's Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq's largest fields, according to ministry officials, oil company officials and an American diplomat.

...

The no-bid contracts are unusual for the industry, and the offers prevailed over others by more than 40 companies, including companies in Russia, China and India. The contracts, which would run for one to two years and are relatively small by industry standards, would nonetheless give the companies an advantage in bidding on future contracts in a country that many experts consider to be the best hope for a large-scale increase in oil production." ***

That is commonly known as the "small steps strategy", one small, dirty step at a time, alone on one's own private road, preferably behind a long, high, thick wall...

But as everyone gathered, oil never had anything to do with our presence in Iraq. Never.

Remember: "Never believe anything until it has been officially denied." (Claud Cockburn)

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http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/19/africa/19iraq.php