In Iraq, it hopes to own the black gold, 1/3 of all supply in the world, and to write the rules of the game, too !
Gas prices have more than doubled yet the Iraq oil fields are now producing twice the amount than before Halberton rebuilt and manages. ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, Shell and BP and OPEC met and decided hold back the oil supply.

By Daphne Eviatar

What does big oil want in Iraq? To regain influence over the great Middle East oilfields, from which Western companies were expelled four decades ago.
THE JOCKEYING HAS already begun, and the race seems likely to be won by American and British firms: ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, Shell and BP. According to industry insiders, these giants are now the front runners in part because British and American troops are likely to end up in control of Baghdad, which can’t help but influence Iraq’s choice of business partners. More important, the world’s largest private oil companies are the only ones that can afford both to restore Iraqi oil production, which is now running at under half its 6 million-barrel-per-day capacity, and to develop its vast untapped fields. To protect the tens of billions they will need to pour into a postwar Iraq, the oil giants are likely to push a controversial form of contract that gives them an ownership stake in the oilfields and guaranteed relief from national tax and environmental laws for the life of the project. So far, oil companies have won these deals, known as production-sharing agreements (PSAs), mainly in weak states that don’t know better than to give away the store—but never in the big Middle Eastern countries. “The issue is not oil per se, but ultimately having the large international oil companies change the terms of their involvement in the region” through production-sharing agreements, says Saudi oil and security analyst Nawaf Obaid.
In a sense, Big Oil would like to turn the clock back to a time before the great wave of nationalizations in the 1970s, when global —giants known as the “seven sisters” were pushed out of much of the Middle East and Latin America. Today, all the world’s largest oil producers are state monopolies, which control the vast bulk of the most easily accessible fields from Saudi Arabia to Mexico. Private giants like ExxonMobil often get stuck with shaky service contracts, and they own reserves only in their home country or in ever more remote and dangerous regions, from the deep sea to Central Asia. Given the risks, oil companies began searching for ways to create as much long-term stability as they could get, and that’s where the production-sharing agreements first came in, shortly after the nationalizations began.

By Daphne Eviatar
Newsweek
March 24, 2003.


Posted on March 22, 2003 @ 10:34AM.

While we were sleeping...
Nations being Lied to by
BIGGER CORPORATIONS
Mark Lawson at the Guardian notes that the generals are already leading the journalists for a merry dance -- a la Norman Schwartzkopf -- tricking them into spreading misinformation that serves their needs. The most recent example: the report that Saddam's men dressed in U.S. and British military uniforms will massacre their own civilians.
Great Outside the Box Links
Check it yourself (it changes daily),
at the U.S. Treasury Department web site.
At that site be sure to read their fantastic link, While we were sleeping...