No child left unrecruited - Page 2

OK. Oil. Please keep in mind that I'm feeble, left-brain soul who has not taken a business or economics class since high school and barely paid attention anyway, but this issue is disturbing enough for me to attempt to understand it (and I welcome corrections).

Why are we in Iraq?

The oil there is shallow, abundant beyond ExxonMobil's wildest dreams, and cheap to produce. So cheap that US/UK oil multinationals (ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco in the US, BP Amoco and Royal Dutch Shell in the UK), don't want to merely do business with a nationalized Iraq oil producer pumping out oil at maximum capacity because it would conceivably put them out of business. They want to control it and take the lion's share profits from production.

My understanding is that Iraq's oil is vastly cheaper to produce than almost all other reserves in the world. And therefore, these multinationals have used their oil agreements and political power to supress Iraqi oil production -- because they are collectively essentially a monopoly working in concert to maintain market control. Our government and ExxonMobil are basically one in the same - it's impossible to separate them wrt the Iraq war. Except that civilians die (not government officials or oil company execs) and citizens will get no piece of the spoils (unless you count soccer moms and nascar dads and their "God-given right" to drive gas-hogging SUVs).

Despite its oil-rich lands, Iraq has had no power in its history of oil dealings with the west and are bitterly resistant to a western takeover of oil production. Yet at the same time the US is the dominant oil consumer, especially in the last 20 yrs, and is a global superpower. So it's been kind of a checkmate. Iraq is unwilling to "give it away for free" to the Great Satan, and the US will only do oil business with a stacked deck.

The answer? Regime change. Invading/occupying Iraq and installing more western-friendly officials will give the US/UK oil multinationals their long lusted for piece of those rich, shallow, cheap oil reserves. The problem? It works better in theory than in practice, as the continued wrangling over the new Iraqi "oil-sharing deal" is revealing. Though it's left out of the mainstream news coverage of this issue - who prefer to speak vaguely of differences between Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds -- the main bone of contention is the enormous giveaway to US/UK multinationals of control and power over oil production and all related services. It's the equivalent of me and my friends, who own the mega mall down the street, breaking into your factory, destroying it, bringing in our own managers and engineers and then asking you to sign a deal that gives us not only control of the factory but control of what it produces and the lion's share of the profits for the next 30 years.

The "coalition of the willing" is gambling on its ability to beat the resistance out of the Iraqis and gain control of a champion heavyweight producer. That's why we're at war - not freedom, democracy, imminent threats, mushroom clouds. Control of Iraq's oil, which we've coveted in earnest for years. That is the power of a monopoly at an insane, unimaginable, all-bets-are-off level.

And the government has used its partners in the corporate media to repeat the meme that Iraqis are vicious, murdering animals so that it will be easier for Americans to swallow the barbarity of our act and cheer on those brave oil moguls for taking resources that are "rightfully ours" for freeing them from Saddam's tyranny.

Beyond the Iraq war, the history of our oil-based economy is fraught with debacles that have edged out other forms of transportation -- such as Standard Oil, General Motors et al buying all the streetcars, dismantling them and replacing them with buses; the deep-sixing of Los Angeles's proposed free monorail; the alleged reluctance foundations have for funding renewable or free energy research projects; the prohibitive costs of solar energy on a consumer level; the bureaucratic resistance wind farmers have faced; the murder of the inventor of the water car; the hounding of Nikola Tesla until he disappeared from public life... on and on.

I realize it sounds like a labyrinthine conspiracy theory but with human ingenuity how is it possible that we have not devised clean, renewable energy? The simplest explanation is Cheney and his Energy cronies are busy behind closed doors making sure that we don't.

Fossil fuels are limited and finite, and tailpipes and smokestacks spewing their waste are destroying the environment necessary to sustain life. Knowing these facts, it seems criminal that our taxpayer dollars are supporting a government that would rather fight a war to secure an industry's market dominance than throw real money at a solution to the time bomb set off by the burning of fossil fuels.

FC, fair enough, but first: do you consider OPEC a monopoly that engages in price fixing?

You know, FC, I think this one is just too hard to prove. The history of the oil companies, from Standard Oil on up, its close collaboration with the government and military, its absorbtion and deep-sixing of competitors, and the cross-pollination of its shareholders with closely aligned industries like the automobile industry, is fraught with antitrust questions. Even back to Bush 41's trip to Riyadh at a time when OPEC's price controlling strategies shifted is suspect, along with Reagan's loosening of oversight and softening of tax laws pertaining to OPEC's US counterparts. Price fixing on the production side affects pricing on the processing and distribution side. And it seems like this situation is working out for US multinationals, especially ExxonMobil.

But you are right in that healthy competition from other regions has emerged. However, the whole scenario is so tied up in politics that it becomes impossible for a layperson such as myself to understand all the nuances of those agreements.

What starts to reveal itself, though, is a motive for much of the conflict in the middle east involving the US military, especially the current Iraq war. As I understand it, US multinationals are losing dominance in their processing and distribution sectors while other producer nations are gaining ground in those areas (with only ExxonMobil being the exception). The only way to gain dominance would be growth in the producer sector, right? Meanwhile, Iraq, whose instability and suppression by western nations has kept it from OPEC-level success, has a diamond in the rough in its untapped oil fields. It's just waiting there to be taken and western multinationals covet it in the worst way.

Because of the anemic development of alternative energy, oil security is intertwined in the minds of politicians and oil companies with national security -- our standing in the world, and our future. Therefore, you start to see where George Bush's fantasy of the history books acknowledging his "rightness" could come into play.

But for me, major alarm bells go off when a country attacks another sovereign country for the sake of "regime change" -- citing hollow justifications every step of the way -- and the only meaningful benchmark that will end the occupation is when that country signs away its oil rights to the invaders/occupiers. So, all those lives are lost, the world is destabilized, our military is denigrated, for the benefit of the US oil multinationals and foisted on us, the US citizens, even though alternative non fossil-fuel technologies languish. (and that's not even going into global warming).

So, while there's competition in the world for western oil interests, competition in the form of the (undeveloped) second largest oil cache in the world is not treated with any kind of fairness. It's taken like a bully would take the lunch of a little kid whose mom packs the best lunch, but who is not the most organized or capable on the playground.

So I guess that's the best argument I can come up with until I read a stack of books on the matter.

Sure. My opening argument is my previous post. You want to serve this time? I'm really interested in hearing alternative theories because the oil grab scenario is both breathtaking in its evilness and heartbreaking when you think of the enormity of the human cost.