Surging oil price drives BP profits to record highs. Can we talk oil?

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Surging oil price and new assets drive BP profits to record highs
By Saeed Shah
27 October 2004

BP forecast yesterday that oil prices would continue to exceed $30 a barrel for the next few years as it reported a 43 per cent jump in quarterly net profits to $3.9bn (£2.2bn), or £1m an hour.

The underlying profit was $3.5bn, before exceptional items, for the third quarter of the year, the highest underlying quarterly profit the company has ever produced. For the first nine months of the year the $12.6bn profit is another record for the oil giant, up 26 per cent on the period last year.

The company is on course to make nearly $17bn for the full year. Oil prices have hit new records, on a weekly or even daily basis, for much of this year, to exceed $50 a barrel.

http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/story.jsp?story=576436

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Before the war, Condi Rice's deputy, Stephen Hadley, spoke to the Council on Foreign Relations in February 2003 about the Future of Iraq project. "If war comes," Hadley said, "it will be a war of liberation, not occupation. The United States needs the support of Iraq's people and it will work to win that support." http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/02/20030212-15.html

"A critical part of the Iraq reconstruction effort will be ensuring that Iraq's oil sector is protected from acts of sabotage by Saddam Hussein's regime," Hadley continued, "and that its proceeds are applied for the benefit of the Iraqi people."

"Iraq's oil and other natural resources belong to all the Iraqi people, and the United States will respect this fact," Hadley
said.

However, White House Executive Order, 13303, is a bald contradiction of that assertion by this administration that the Iraqi people are to benefit from our seizure of their resources.

Executive Order, 13303 decrees that 'any attachment, judgment, decree, lien, execution, garnishment, or other judicial process is prohibited, and shall be deemed null and void', with respect to the Development Fund for Iraq and "all Iraqi petroleum and petroleum products, and interests therein." (The Development Fund, derived from actual and expected Iraqi oil and gas sales, apparently will be used to leverage U.S. government-backed loans, credit, and direct financing for U.S. corporate reconstruction operations in Iraq.) http://a257.g.akamaitech.net/7/257/2422/14mar20010800/edocket.access.gpo.gov/2003/pdf/03-13412.pdf

In other words, all of the oil, resources and industry are the property of the U.S.; to trade, sell, and disperse at its discretion. The only ones who will benefit from the robbery of the Iraqi oil are the companies that we will allow to exploit it. The oil mongers will incestuously share the stolen profits at the expense of American lives.

The oil was supposed to fund the war, as obscene as that sounds. But the money from big oil never, never reaches the indigenous cultures. No Iraqi should expect to wrest control over their own wells from the U.S. or its allies. It's likely that the only contact Iraqis will have with their own oil will be at the foreign-owned gas stations.

Shell and British Petroleum (Tony Blair's payoff), were among the first foreign companies to be given contracts from the resumption of Iraqi oil exports when the country signed its first long-term supply deals since the war was declared over.

Among the other companies that are thought to have signed deals with Iraq are, ChevronTexaco, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Marathon Oil Corp, Sinochem of China, Mitsubishi Corp, Repsol YPF and Vitol SA.

BP continues to search for oil and, along with other companies, it has been criticized for operations in the Amazon, where a number of Indian Reserves have been affected.

From the Philippines to Louisiana, oil wells and refineries victimize the people and destroy the pristine environments with polluted air which causes skin lesions and respiratory illnesses, and damage from spills which no amount of money can replace or mollify. The land is useless for farming of wildlife after the rigs are set up. The monsters spew their toxic flares of unusable chemicals into the atmosphere and regularly spray the surrounding land and pollute the nearby water sources with deadly residues. The plants and the trees in previously fertile regions turn brown and lose their foliage.

The community's money is often used up with the promise of providing jobs which never materialize.

The U.S. currently receives 16 percent of its imported oil from sub-Saharan Africa—more than it gets from Saudi Arabia. West Africa exported almost twice as much crude oil to the U.S. in 2001 as it did to Europe (68.1 million tons to the U.S., 34.9 million tons to Europe). http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/aug2002/oil-a20.shtml

According to projections by the U.S. National Intelligence Council, the proportion of oil imported to the U.S. from sub-Saharan Africa will reach 25 percent by 2015, exceeding that from the Persian Gulf. http://www.odci.gov/nic/NIC_globaltrend2015.html#link8c

The consumption of oil per dollar of GDP is now more than 40 percent higher in the United States than it is in Germany and France. The U.S. possesses only 3% of the world's oil reserves, but we consume over 25 percent of the world's oil supply.

There is ample opportunity for a lessening of our dependence through the promotion and utilization of any combination of renewable sources of energy. No war should be waged to defend this wasteful and destructive reliance on fossil fuel. (RF)

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1. it's all about the oil

The Bush I administration's stated objective in their Gulf war was to protect the flow of Mideast oil to the U.S. and to prevent Iraq from obtaining a seaport from which Iraqi shipments would supposedly depress an already sputtering world market.

The Bush I administration issued a national security directive which listed among its objectives; ". . . the defense of U.S. vital interests in the region, if necessary through the use of military force; and defense against forces that would cause added damage to the U.S. and world economies."
http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/research/nsd (National Security Directives, George Bush Presidential Library)

More importantly, the security directive declared that access to Persian Gulf oil and the security of key, friendly states in the area were vital to U.S. national security. It was on that basis that President Herbert Walker Bush waged war with Iraq.