Re: SC44

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=6176

Big Oil and Big Media Confront Hugo Chavez

........Venezuelan V. Iraqi Oil Policies - A Study in Contrasts

High-level US officials from the administration, Congress and Pentagon are pressuring the puppet Iraqi parliament to pass its new "Hydrocarbon Law" drafted in Washington and by Big US and UK oil companies. Its provisions are in stark contrast to Venezuela's oil management policies under Hugo Chavez. For Chavez, his nation and peoples' interests come first. In Iraq, however, Big Oil licensed plunder will become law if the parliament agrees to accept what its occupier and corporate interests demand. At this stage, it's nearly certain it will clearing the way for stealing part of what a US state department spokesperson in 1945 called "a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history" - the vast (mostly Saudi) Middle East oil reserves.

In Venezuela, the nation and its people will benefit most from the country's oil wealth. In Iraq, their resources are earmarked mostly for Big US and UK Oil. The new "Hydrocarbon Law" is a shameless act of theft on the grandest of scale. It's a privatization blueprint for plunder giving foreign investors a bonanza of resources, leaving Iraqis a mere sliver for themselves. As now written, its complex provisions give the Iraqi National Oil Company exclusive control of just 17 of the country's 80 known oil fields with all yet-to-be-discovered deposits set aside for foreign investors.

Even worse, Big Oil is free to expropriate all earnings with no obligation to invest anything in Iraq's economy, partner with Iraqi companies, hire local workers, respect union rights, or share new technologies. Foreign investors will be granted long-term contracts up to 30 or more years, dispossessing Iraq and its people of their own resources in a naked scheme to steal them.

The Wall Street Journal, New York Times and rest of the dominant US media shamelessly denounce Hugo Chavez for his courage and honor doing the right thing. In contrast, their silence, and effective complicity, on what will be one of the greatest ever corporate crimes when implemented shows their gross hypocrisy. It'll be up to the people of Iraq to resist and reclaim what Venezuelan people already have from its social democratic leader serving their interests above all others..............

How dare Venezuala decide that they will no longer be " compelled " by the increasingly oil thirsty US to pony up thier national reserves of Oil, at our US Multinational Oil Companies whims. The Iraqi's, at this point, with a completely devastated country, thanks to a Fake War created by Bush and Crew, and with the US Puppet Government running thier affairs, don't for the time being, have anyone looking after thier interest, but they are a country of millions of people, and sooner or later, they will wake up to whats being done to them, and as we are already seeing even now, there will be no Green Zone big enough to contain thier angst. And would we behave any differantly in defending our " homeland " as Dictator Bush loves to call the United States, if some other country did to us, what we are doing to the Iraqi people, invade them falsely, occupy them, destroy thier country, take by deception and force the resource ( oil ) we wanted in the first place, set up the biggest embassy in the world, along with numerous huge ( permanent ) military bases so we can in truth continue to exert our military force in the region to keep the oil flowing to our oil addicted economy, and call it all moral, acceptable, and legal, because of the Fake Government that was " instilled " by those same invaders? Do you think for a minute, Americans would stand for that? This is exactly what is happening to the Iraqi people.