Cheney can't understand why they can't get that oil law signed

That's really why he's pushing and demanding they not take a vacation. The oil companies are getting anxious:

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Vice President Dick Cheney met Wednesday with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to push al-Maliki's government into adopting U.S.-favored changes before American military commander Gen. David Petraeus must report to Congress on whether the "surge" of American troops has been succeeding.

Cheney pressed Maliki to stop the Iraqi parliament from taking its scheduled two-month summer recess. President Bush made a similar appeal in a videoconference with al-Maliki on Monday.

"I did make it clear that we believe it's very important to move on the issues before us in a timely fashion and that any undue delay would be difficult to explain," Cheney told reporters after his day of back-to-back meetings. "I think they're somewhat sympathetic to our concerns."

[snip]

In his speech Jan. 10 in which he announced the dispatch of tens of thousands of additional U.S. troops to Iraq, Bush said the increase would help provide security so that Iraq's government could resolve critical issues involving oil revenues, deBaathification, and the constitution.

But the parliament has made virtually no progress in those areas. A draft oil law is in committee, and there's been no discussion on easing rules that bar Baathists from serving in government. A report from a committee on proposed changes to Iraq's constitution is due to parliament on Tuesday.

Few here expect the parliament to reach agreement on the issues, even if it stays in session an extra month.

I think the Iraqi Parliament realizes once they sign away their nation's resources to foreign companies, their lives are forfeit. It looks like they are trying to wait Bush and Cheney out.

Giiiiivvvveee iiiiittttt tooooooo meeeeeee:

Update: I posted on this before, why privatization, why the bill is stuck, who benefits.

Update: Michael Schwartz of the Asia Times:

Since the invasion of Iraq, US officials have melded economic and military policy into a single fatal brew, driven by dreams of controlling the country's fabulous potential oil wealth. The key "benchmark", therefore, that the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki must pass is passage of a new oil law forced on it by the Bush administration. Widespread opposition to the law, though, could result in escalating conflict that leaves the oil out of the United States' reach.

It's all about who DOESN'T get the oil

Greg Palast: (my bold)

In all the chest-beating about how the war did badly, no one seems to remember how the war did very, very well — for Big Oil.

The war has kept Iraq’s oil production to 2.1 million barrels a day from pre-war, pre-embargo production of over 4 million barrels. In the oil game, that’s a lot to lose. In fact, the loss of Iraq’s 2 million barrels a day is equal to the entire planet’s reserve production capacity.

In other words, the war has caused a hell of a supply squeeze — and Big Oil just loves it. Oil today is $57 a barrel versus the $18 a barrel price under Bill “Love-Not-War” Clinton.

Since the launch of Operation Iraqi Liberation, Halliburton stock has tripled to $64 a share — not, as some believe, because of those Iraq reconstruction contracts — peanuts for Halliburton. Cheney’s former company’s main business is “oil services.” And, as one oilman complained to me, Cheney’s former company has captured a big hunk of the rise in oil prices by jacking up the charges for Halliburton drilling and piping equipment.

But before we shed tears for Big Oil’s having to hand Halliburton its slice, let me note that the value of the reserves of the five biggest oil companies more than doubled during the war to $2.36 trillion.

And that was the plan: putting a new floor under the price of oil. I have that in writing. In 2005, after a two-year battle with the State and Defense Departments, they released to my team at BBC Newsnight the “Options for a Sustainable Iraqi Oil Industry.” Now, you might think our government shouldn’t be writing a plan for another nation’s oil. Well, our government didn’t write it, despite the State Department seal on the cover. In fact, we discovered that the 323-page plan was drafted in Houston by oil industry executives and consultants.

The suspicion is that Bush went to war to get Iraq’s oil. That’s not true. The document, and secret recordings of those in on the scheme, made it clear that the Administration wanted to make certain America did not get the oil. In other words, keep the lid on Iraq’s oil production — and thereby keep the price of oil high.

Cheney must be so proud

Halliburton settles in:

MANAMA (Reuters) - Halliburton Co. , the U.S. oilfield service giant, said on Sunday its chief executive plans to open a corporate headquarters in the United Arab Emirates in an effort to expand business in the Eastern Hemisphere.

"My office will be in Dubai, and I will run our entire worldwide operations from that office," Halliburton chief executive David Lesar said at an energy conference in Bahrain. "Dubai is a great business center."

Update: Waxman wants to know why:

Time’s Karen Tumulty comments on Halliburton’s plan to move its headquarters from Houston to Dubai: “Is this about tax breaks? Getting beyond the reach of congressional subpoenas? And what about all that sensitive information that Halliburton has had access to? At a minimum, reincorporating in Dubai would mean that Halliburton will be paying less taxes to the U.S. Treasury, even as it collects billions from government contracts.” She also reports, “Henry Waxman is already planning to hold a hearing on this, an aide tells me.”

The chess board of global politics

Where nations are bet and lives are squandered, all for oil and greed, energy and power. Compare these headlines:

CNPC in Iraq looking for old oil deal

Gadhafi: U.S., U.K. use Iraq oil money

China pushes alternate-fuel vehicles

Turkey: Foreign firms want into Iraq oil

Key Iraq Sunni group warns against oil law

Iran: Russian nuclear plant payments made

This Iraqi oil law

I do not think it means what you say it means:

Iraq's cabinet has approved a draft oil law which aims to equitably share revenues from its oil revenues among the country's ethnic groups.

The bill - allocating oil revenues between Iraq's 18 provinces based on their population levels - must now be submitted to parliament for a vote.

Prime Minister Nouri Maliki called the deal a "gift to all the Iraqi people".

But careful reading of the 'bill' indicates this:

Many Iraqi oil experts, such as Fouad al-Ameer, who was responsible for the leak, think this law is not an urgent item on the country's agenda. Other observers and analysis share Ameer's views and believe the Bush administration, foreign oil companies and the International Monetary Fund are rushing the Iraqi government to pass the law.

Not every aspect of the law is harmful to Iraq. However, the current language favors the interests of foreign oil corporations over the economic security and development of Iraq. The law's key negative components harm Iraq's national sovereignty, financial security, territorial integrity and democracy.

National sovereignty and financial security
The new oil law gives foreign corporations access to almost every sector of Iraq's oil and natural-gas industry. This includes service contracts on existing fields that are already being developed and that are managed and operated by the Iraqi National Oil Co (INOC).

For fields that have already been discovered, but not yet developed, the proposed law stipulates that INOC will have to be a partner on these contracts. But for as-yet-undiscovered fields, neither INOC nor private Iraqi companies receive preference in new exploration and development. Foreign companies have full access to these contracts.

The exploration and production contracts give firms exclusive control of fields for up to 35 years, including contracts that guarantee profits for 25 years. A foreign company, if hired, is not required to partner with an Iraqi company or reinvest any of its money in the Iraqi economy. It's not obligated to hire Iraqi workers, train Iraqi workers or transfer technology.

How many of the Iraqi politicians who vote this in will have to go into hiding with their stash of US money for giving away Iraqi resources?

And then you realize that Iraq as a failed state was the focus all along:

The law represents no less than institutionalized raping and pillaging of Iraq's oil wealth. It represents the death knell of nationalized (from 1972 to 1975) Iraqi resources, now replaced by production sharing agreements (PSAs) - which translate into savage privatization and monster profit rates of up to 75% for (basically US) Big Oil. Sixty-five of Iraq's roughly 80 oilfields already known will be offered for Big Oil to exploit. As if this were not enough, the law reduces in practice the role of Baghdad to a minimum. Oil wealth, in theory, will be distributed directly to Kurds in the north, Shi'ites in the south and Sunnis in the center. For all practical purposes, Iraq will be partitioned into three statelets. Most of the country's reserves are in the Shi'ite-dominated south, while the Kurdish north holds the best prospects for future drilling.

The approval of the draft law by the fractious 275-member Iraqi Parliament, in March, will be a mere formality. Hussain al-Shahristani, Iraq's oil minister, is beaming. So is dodgy Barnham Salih: a Kurd, committed cheerleader of the US invasion and occupation, then deputy prime minister, big PSA fan, and head of a committee that was debating the law.

But there was not much to be debated. The law was in essence drafted, behind locked doors, by a US consulting firm hired by the Bush administration and then carefully retouched by Big Oil, the International Monetary Fund, former US deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz' World Bank, and the United States Agency for International Development. It's virtually a US law (its original language is English, not Arabic).

Scandalously, Iraqi public opinion had absolute no knowledge of it - not to mention the overwhelming majority of Parliament members. Were this to be a truly representative Iraqi government, any change to the legislation concerning the highly sensitive question of oil wealth would have to be approved by a popular referendum.

In real life, Iraq's vital national interests are in the hands of a small bunch of highly impressionable (or downright corrupt) technocrats. Ministries are no more than political party feuds; the national interest is never considered, only private, ethnic and sectarian interests. Corruption and theft are endemic. Big Oil will profit handsomely - and long-term, 30 years minimum, with fabulous rates of return - from a former developing-world stalwart methodically devastated into failed-state status.

Apparently ExxonMobil is ruled by an out of control goiter

That responds only to money. Bribing scientists to deny global warming. Then trying to hand over the problem to the consumers.

It's way past the time we need to talk about alternate energy sources, alternate transportation, alternate CEOs with a desire to do right by the world.

ExxonMobil behind the sabotage of the science of global warming

Thank the oil companies for preventing us from addressing this in a timely manner. Thank ExxonMobil while water floods your house or you suffer through a summer of record-breaking heat. Thank the greed that drove them to block, smear, sabotage the science that would help save the world.

Exxon has responded to roars of recent outrage over its anti-social antics by announcing that it has stopped funding the Competitive Enterprise Institute which has collected over $2 million from the oil giant since 1998 to weave lies about climate change -- and 4-5 other groups that Exxon refused to name.

Exxon's new contrition is hardly sincere. The company still continues to fund 40 other groups in its unrelenting campaign of deception. Two weeks ago, the ExxposeExxon coalition -- composed of America's most respected environmental groups, including NRDC, the Sierra Club and U.S. PIRG -- asked Exxon to disclose the names of all the other groups the company funded this year and the nature of the work they are doing for ExxonMobil. Exxon did not respond to the request.

As further evidence of the company's insincerity, Exxon's chief executive and CEO Rex Tillerson, on Friday told world leaders in Davos that oil companies should not be held responsible for global warming. The blame, he argued, rests instead with the very consumers and government officials his company has spent millions of dollars manipulating and defrauding.

America is a decade late in addressing the serious threat from global warming largely due to ExxonMobil's campaign of deliberate deception. ExxonMobil's conduct amounts to a war on civilization. The company can't simply sweep this legacy of fraud and villainy under the rug with a paid op-ed campaign in the New York Times, or with oily statements shifting the blame to consumers. The company needs to cease its campaign of deception completely if it is to genuinely atone for its crimes against humanity.

ExxonMobil might also apply some of its record profits -- estimated at $37 billion last year -- toward meaningful solutions to global warming as other U.S. companies have done.

For starters ExxonMobil might consider joining a coalition of ten major companies -- including industry giants like DuPont, Dow and Alcoa -- and leading environmental groups which last week launched the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, calling for firm limits on carbon dioxide emissions to aggressively combat climate change.

What Bush's administration has been striving for from the beginning

Can anyone claim to be surprised?

HOUSTON (AP) -- Oil giant Exxon Mobil Corp. on Thursday posted the largest annual profit by a U.S. company - $39.5 billion - even as earnings for the last quarter of 2006 declined 4 percent.

The 2006 profit topped Exxon Mobil's own previous record of $36.13 billion set in 2005.

Revenue at the world's largest publicly traded oil company rose to $377.64 billion for the year, surpassing the record $370.68 billion Exxon posted in 2005.

"Exxon Mobil continued to leverage its globally diverse resource base to bring additional crude oil and natural gas to market," Rex W. Tillerson, chairman of the Irvin, Texas-based company, said in a statement.

Kurds say not so fast, buster!

Signing away one's own country's resources to foreign oil companies is all well and good, but even an idiot knows to get their promises to share in writing!

IRBIL, Iraq, Jan. 24 Iraqi Kurdish officials say a deal has not been struck for a federal hydrocarbons law despite the oil ministry's assurance the law would be voted on soon.

Kurdistan Regional Government Oil Minister Ashti Hawrami told the Financial Times the relatively stable oil-producing northern region has not agreed to the oil law.

Several issues are not still resolved, Hawrami said. The ministry of oil statement is unfortunately premature.Negotiations over a law governing all of Iraq's oil and natural gas production have been ongoing for months. It is stuck on control and revenue sharing between the central and regional government.

The Kurds and some of the Shiites in the south, where most of Iraq's 115 billion barrels of proven oil reserves are, want more of a regional control. KRG officials say they want the final say on all future contracts while the central government wants to have complete control.

The KRG also wants an automatic mechanism for sharing revenue from oil and natural gas sales, which has not been finalized yet.

Hawrami said more meetings are set for next week.

Graft and corruption in Iraq over money and oil?

What's more American than that?
"The American company appointed to advise the US government on the economic reconstruction of Iraq has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars into Republican Party coffers and has admitted that its own finances are in chaos because of accounting errors and bad management.

BearingPoint is fighting to restore its reputation in the US after falling more than a year behind in reporting its own financial results, prompting legal actions from its creditors and shareholders.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, BearingPoint employees gave $117,000 (£60,000) to the 2000 and 2004 Bush election campaigns, more than any other Iraq contractor. Other recipients include three prominent Congressmen on the House of Representatives' defence sub-committee, which oversees defence department contracts.

One of the biggest single contributors to BearingPoint's in-house political fund was James Horner, who heads the company's emerging markets business which is working in Iraq and Afghanistan. He donated $5,000 in August 2005."

[snip]

"BearingPoint is being paid $240m for its work in Iraq, winning an initial contract from the US Agency for International Development (USAid) within weeks of the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. It was charged with supporting the then Coalition Provisional Authority to introduce policies "which are designed to create a competitive private sector". Its role is to examine laws, regulations and institutions that regulate trade, commerce and investment, and to advise ministries and the central bank.

Last week The Independent on Sunday revealed that a BearingPoint employee, based in the US embassy in Baghdad, had been tasked with advising the Iraqi Ministry of Oil on drawing up a new hydrocarbon law. The legislation, which is due to be presented to Iraq's parliament within days, will give Western oil companies a large slice of profits from the country's oil fields in exchange for investing in new oil infrastructure."

Corporations advance on Iraq to control the oil

Fundanmentalist Druid wonders how they will pull it off.

How surprising!

SpeigelOnline:
"The Iraqi government is considering a new oil law that could give private oil companies greater control over its vast reserves. In light of rampant violence and shaky democratic institutions, many fear the law is being pushed through hastily by special interests behind closed doors."
[snip]
"Oil, of course, can be politically explosive at the best of times, let alone the worst. So, when the country with the third largest oil reserves in the world debates the future of its endowment during a time of civil war, people sit up and take notice.

The Iraqi government is working on a new hydrocarbons law that will set the course for the country's oil sector and determine where its vast revenues will flow. The consequences for such a law in such a state are huge. Not only could it determine the future shape of the Iraqi federation -- as regional governments battle with Baghdad's central authority over rights to the riches -- but it could put much of Iraqi oil into the hands of foreign oil companies."

(My bold)

Update: Thanks to Tengrain's comment, I did research on the ISG's recommendations for Iraq and its oil. Sure enough:

"In other words, the United States will transform its military occupation into a management occupation.

We would help the Iraqis set up this new oil industry, and in turn--well...this is obvious--the United States would become customer "numero uno" to this new oil industry. We teach the Iraqis how to use corporations to turn oil reserves into billionaires, and a few close friends of the Bush family get to call the new Iraqi oil tycoons "cousin"--just like Saudi Arabia."

[snip]

"And hence, whereas the Neo-Cons saw themselves as creating an free market garden of eden that would transform Iraq, the Middle East and the world, the ISG has proposed creating an oil nationalism that would transform Iraq, the oil tycoons of Texas and Saudi Arabia, and the oil tycoons of the world (who mostly live in Texas and Saudi Arabia).

Saudi Arabia 2.0 is what we would get: an oil nation run by immoral princes with special relationships to oil conglomerates in the U.S."

And here:
"In other words open it up to Western Big Oil companies. No nationalization, let the companies make the profits."

The climate of fear.

"Science Teachers' Organization Refuses To Accept Copies of Inconvenient Truth."
"In their e-mail rejection, they expressed concern that other “special interests” might ask to distribute materials, too; they said they didn’t want to offer “political” endorsement of the film; and they saw “little, if any, benefit to NSTA or its members” in accepting the free DVDs. …

[T]here was one more curious argument in the e-mail: Accepting the DVDs, they wrote, would place “unnecessary risk upon the [NSTA] capital campaign, especially certain targeted supporters.”"

Like oil companies: "including Exxon-Mobil, Shell Oil, and the American Petroleum Institute" which are working actively against the Kyoto Agreement.


Joshua Marshall notes:
"GOP stalwarts like Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), who is chairman of the Senate committee on the environment, are way out on the whacky right fringe but have managed to dominate their party's discussion of global warming, if not stifle the conversation outright. That's not to say that corporate America has suddenly turned green. Exxon Mobile, for example, has been a particularly vigorous sponsor of global warming deniers. But there has been in place a broader political consensus on the issue than one might be led to believe by looking at the leading voices of the GOP.

Today the WaPo surveys the current political landscape. Corporate America knows that the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions is coming. Now it's gearing up to maximize its influence on what that legislation will look like."