The "War for Oil" Comes Home

Tuesday, 31 October 2006
U.S. Drops Bid Over Royalties From Chevron

The "War for Oil" is not just being fought in Iraq, you know. For as the Warmonger-in-Chief never tires of telling us, the "Homeland" itself is a major front in his never-ending war on – not terror, because his policies are fomenting and exacerbating terrorism around the world – but on anything and everything that might impinge in the slightest degree on the profits, power and privilege of the tiny clique of predatory elites that he represents.

The NYT story, an excellent piece of explanatory journalism by Edmund Andrews, lays out the details of the scam – just one of many by which Big Oil uses its hired hands in Washington to cheat the American people out of billions of dollars in fees and royalties from the use of public land for corporate profit. As Andrews makes clear, the entire system is honeycombed with sweetheart clauses and deliberate ambiguities that allow the oil barons to take vast rake-offs – some of which they obligingly return in various forms of baksheesh to their political servants.

We hear a great deal – and rightly so – about the pernicious evil in the Bush Regime's attempt to wrest away the oil wealth of the Iraqi people and hand it to corporate cronies. But of course this was done to the American people long ago, and is still going on today. It's just the way the business works: gouging the rubes and dodging the law (or in most cases these days, simply writing the law yourself and ordering your flunkies in Congress and the White House to enact it). Only last week, ExxonMobil announced quarterly profits of $10.49 billion. That's profit, pure gravy, from a single quarter – and what's more, a quarter when the price of oil actually went down. It was the second highest quarterly profit ever recorded by a company in world history, surpassed only by the $10.71 billion windfall pocketed in late 2005 by, er, ExxonMobil. >>>cont

Chris Floyd