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Gary Edwards

The Real Reason for the Iraq War | VICE United Kingdom - 1 views

www.vice.com/...asnt-waged-for-oil-greg-palast

Oil Iraq neocons Saudi Banksters Oilsters

shared by Gary Edwards on 29 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Like most lefty journalists, I assumed that George Bush and Tony Blair invaded Iraq to buy up its oil fields, cheap and at gun-point, and cart off the oil. We thought we knew the neo-cons true casus belli: Blood for oil. But the truth in the Options for Iraqi Oil Industry was worse than "Blood for Oil". Much, much worse.
  • Within days, our chief of investigations, Ms Badpenny, delivered to my shack in the woods outside New York a 323-page, three-volume programme for Iraq's oil crafted by George Bush's State Department and petroleum insiders meeting secretly in Houston, Texas. I cracked open the pile of paper – and I was blown away.
  • I'd already had in my hands a 101-page document, another State Department secret scheme, first uncovered by Wall Street Journal reporter Neil King, that called for the privatisation, the complete sell-off of every single government-owned asset and industry. And in case anyone missed the point, the sales would include every derrick, pipe and barrel of oil, or, as the document put it, "especially the oil". That plan was created by a gaggle of corporate lobbyists and neo-cons working for the Heritage Foundation. In 2004, the plan's authenticity was confirmed by Washington power player Grover Norquist. (It's hard to erase the ill memory of Grover excitedly waving around his soft little hands as he boasted about turning Iraq into a free-market Disneyland, recreating Chile in Mesopotamia, complete with the Pinochet-style dictatorship necessary to lock up the assets – while behind Norquist, Richard Nixon snarled at me from a gargantuan portrait.) The neo-con idea was to break up and sell off Iraq's oil fields, ramp up production, flood the world oil market – and thereby smash OPEC and with it, the political dominance of Saudi Arabia.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • General Jay Garner also confirmed the plan to grab the oil. Indeed, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld fired Garner, when the General, who had lived in Iraq, complained the neo-con grab would set off a civil war. It did. Nevertheless, Rumsfeld replaced Garner with a new American viceroy, Paul Bremer, a partner in Henry Kissinger's firm, to complete the corporate takeover of Iraq's assets – "especially the oil".
  • But that was not to be. While Bremer oversaw the wall-to-wall transfer of Iraqi industries to foreign corporations, he was stopped cold at the edge of the oil fields. How? I knew there was only one man who could swat away the entire neo-con army: James Baker, former Secretary of State, Bush family consiglieri and most important, counsel to Exxon-Mobil Corporation and the House of Saud.
  • There was no way in hell that Baker's clients, from Exxon to Abdullah, were going to let a gaggle of neo-con freaks smash up Iraq's oil industry, break OPEC production quotas, flood the market with six million bbd of Iraqi oil and thereby knock the price of oil back down to $13 a barrel where it was in 1998.
  • Big Oil could not allow Iraq's oil fields to be privatised and taken from state control. That would make it impossible to keep Iraq within OPEC (an avowed goal of the neo-cons) as the state could no longer limit production in accordance with the cartel's quota system. The US oil industry was using its full political mojo to prevent their being handed ownership of Iraq's oil fields. That's right: The oil companies didn't want to own the oil fields – and they sure as hell didn't want the oil. Just the opposite. They wanted to make sure there would be a limit on the amount of oil that would come out of Iraq. Saddam wasn't trying to stop the flow of oil – he was trying to sell more. The price of oil had been boosted 300 percent by sanctions and an embargo cutting Iraq's sales to two million barrels a day from four. With Saddam gone, the only way to keep the damn oil in the ground was to leave it locked up inside the busted state oil company which would remain under OPEC (i.e. Saudi) quotas. The James Baker Institute quickly and secretly started in on drafting the 323-page plan for the State Department. With authority granted from the top (i.e. Dick Cheney), ex-Shell Oil USA CEO Phil Carroll was rushed to Baghdad in May 2003 to take charge of Iraq's oil. He told Bremer, "There will be no privatisation of oil – END OF STATEMENT." Carroll then passed off control of Iraq's oil to Bob McKee of Halliburton, Cheney's old oil-services company, who implemented the Baker "enhance OPEC" option anchored in state ownership.
  • This week, VICE readers can download, for free, Greg Palast's investigation of the war in Iraq in the BBC film, Bush Family Fortunes, at www.GregPalast.com – as well as the illustrated poster of "The Secret History of War over Oil in Iraq" from Palast's international bestseller, Armed Madhouse, also at www.GregPalast.com
  • Some oil could be released, mainly to China, through limited, but lucrative, "production sharing agreements". And that's how George Bush won the war in Iraq. The invasion was not about "blood for oil", but something far more sinister: blood for no oil. War to keep supply tight and send prices skyward. Oil men, whether James Baker or George Bush or Dick Cheney, are not in the business of producing oil. They are in the business of producing profits. And they've succeeded. Iraq, capable of producing six to 12 million barrels of oil a day, still exports well under its old OPEC quota of three million barrels. The result: As we mark the tenth anniversary of the invasion this month, we also mark the fifth year of crude at $100 a barrel. As George Bush could proudly say to James Baker: Mission Accomplished!
  • Paul Merrell on 29 Mar 13
     
    The Sherman Act forbids conspiracies in restraint of trade and is at its zenith in price-fixing cases. This looks to be the mother of all price-fixing cases, to say the least.   
  • Gary Edwards on 30 Mar 13
     
    Wow, Marbux has it right.  This report from the legendary Greg Palast of the BBC News Network is a stunning reversal of what everyone believed to be the truth.  To wit, the militarist and global strategist - resource control hungry neocon contingent of the Repubican party was always thought to be behind the Iraqi war.  For control of cheap, plentiful oil and, the protection / destruction of Israel's enemies.   Funny, but it turns out America was fighting for higher oil prices and limited supplies.  Just as in the first Gulf War, Americans were fighting to protect Saudi and big oil profits. excerpt: Big Oil could not allow Iraq's oil fields to be privatised and taken from state control. That would make it impossible to keep Iraq within OPEC (an avowed goal of the neo-cons) as the state could no longer limit production in accordance with the cartel's quota system. The US oil industry was using its full political mojo to prevent their being handed ownership of Iraq's oil fields. That's right: The oil companies didn't want to own the oil fields - and they sure as hell didn't want the oil. Just the opposite. They wanted to make sure there would be a limit on the amount of oil that would come out of Iraq. Saddam wasn't trying to stop the flow of oil - he was trying to sell more. The price of oil had been boosted 300 percent by sanctions and an embargo cutting Iraq's sales to two million barrels a day from four. With Saddam gone, the only way to keep the damn oil in the ground was to leave it locked up inside the busted state oil company which would remain under OPEC (i.e. Saudi) quotas. The James Baker Institute quickly and secretly started in on drafting the 323-page plan for the State Department. With authority granted from the top (i.e. Dick Cheney), ex-Shell Oil USA CEO Phil Carroll was rushed to Baghdad in May 2003 to take charge of Iraq's oil. He told Bremer, "There will be no privatisation of oil - END OF STATEMENT." Carroll then passed off control
Gary Edwards

Jim Kunstler's 2014 Forecast - Burning Down The House | Zero Hedge - 0 views

www.zerohedge.com/...14-forecast-burning-down-house

Banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 08 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Jan 14
     
    Incredible must read analysis. Take away: the world is going to go "medevil". It's the only way out of this mess. Since the zero hedge layout is so bad, i'm going to post as much of the article as Diigo will allow: Jim Kunstler's 2014 Forecast - Burning Down The House Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/06/2014 19:36 -0500 Submitted by James H. Kunstler of Kunstler.com , Many of us in the Long Emergency crowd and like-minded brother-and-sisterhoods remain perplexed by the amazing stasis in our national life, despite the gathering tsunami of forces arrayed to rock our economy, our culture, and our politics. Nothing has yielded to these forces already in motion, so far. Nothing changes, nothing gives, yet. It's like being buried alive in Jell-O. It's embarrassing to appear so out-of-tune with the consensus, but we persevere like good soldiers in a just war. Paper and digital markets levitate, central banks pull out all the stops of their magical reality-tweaking machine to manipulate everything, accounting fraud pervades public and private enterprise, everything is mis-priced, all official statistics are lies of one kind or another, the regulating authorities sit on their hands, lost in raptures of online pornography (or dreams of future employment at Goldman Sachs), the news media sprinkles wishful-thinking propaganda about a mythical "recovery" and the "shale gas miracle" on a credulous public desperate to believe, the routine swindles of medicine get more cruel and blatant each month, a tiny cohort of financial vampire squids suck in all the nominal wealth of society, and everybody else is left whirling down the drain of posterity in a vortex of diminishing returns and scuttled expectations. Life in the USA is like living in a broken-down, cob-jobbed, vermin-infested house that needs to be gutted, disinfected, and rebuilt - with the hope that it might come out of the restoration process retaining the better qualities of our heritage.
Paul Merrell

US's Saudi Oil Deal from Win-Win to Mega-Loose | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...eal-from-win-win-to-mega-loose

must-read banksters big oil Saudis Russia shale-oil U.S.-foreign-policy

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • Who would’ve thought it would come to this? Certainly not the Obama Administration, and their brilliant geo-political think-tank neo-conservative strategists. John Kerry’s brilliant “win-win” proposal of last September during his September 11 Jeddah meeting with ailing Saudi King Abdullah was simple: Do a rerun of the highly successful State Department-Saudi deal in 1986 when Washington persuaded the Saudis to flood the world market at a time of over-supply in order to collapse oil prices worldwide, a kind of “oil shock in reverse.” In 1986 was successful in helping to break the back of a faltering Soviet Union highly dependent on dollar oil export revenues for maintaining its grip on power. So, though it was not made public, Kerry and Abdullah agreed on September 11, 2014 that the Saudis would use their oil muscle to bring Putin’s Russia to their knees today.
  • It seemed brilliant at the time no doubt. On the following day, 12 September 2014, the US Treasury’s aptly-named Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, headed by Treasury Under-Secretary David S. Cohen, announced new sanctions against Russia’s energy giants Gazprom, Gazprom Neft, Lukoil, Surgutneftgas and Rosneft. It forbid US oil companies to participate with the Russian companies in joint ventures for oil or gas offshore or in the Arctic. Then, just as the ruble was rapidly falling and Russian major corporations were scrambling for dollars for their year-end settlements, a collapse of world oil prices would end Putin’s reign. That was clearly the thinking of the hollowed-out souls who pass for statesmen in Washington today. Victoria Nuland was jubilant, praising the precision new financial warfare weapon at David Cohen’s Treasury financial terrorism unit. In July, 2014 West Texas Intermediate, the benchmark price for US domestic oil pricing, traded at $101 a barrel. The shale oil bonanza was booming, making the US into a major oil player for the first time since the 1970’s. When WTI hit $46 at the beginning of January this year, suddenly things looked different. Washington realized they had shot themselves in the foot.
  • They realized that the over-indebted US shale oil industry was about to collapse under the falling oil price. Behind the scenes Washington and Wall Street colluded to artificially stabilize what then was an impending chain-reaction bankruptcy collapse in the US shale oil industry. As a result oil prices began a slow rise, hitting $53 in February. The Wall Street and Washington propaganda mills began talking about the end of falling oil prices. By May prices had crept up to $62 and almost everyone was convinced oil recovery was in process. How wrong they were.
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  • Since that September 11 Kerry-Abdullah meeting (curious date to pick, given the climate of suspicion that the Bush family is covering up involvement of the Saudis in or around the events of September 11, 2001), the Saudis have a new ageing King, Absolute Monarch and Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman, replacing the since deceased old ageing King, Abdullah. However, the Oil Minister remains unchanged—79-year-old Ali al-Naimi. It was al-Naimi who reportedly saw the golden opportunity in the Kerry proposal to use the chance to at the same time kill off the growing market challenge from the rising output of the unconventional USA shale oil industry. Al-Naimi has said repeatedly that he is determined to eliminate the US shale oil “disturbance” to Saudi domination of world oil markets. Not only are the Saudis unhappy with the US shale oil intrusion on their oily Kingdom. They are more than upset with the recent deal the Obama Administration made with Iran that will likely lead in several months to lifting Iran economic sanctions. In fact the Saudis are beside themselves with rage against Washington, so much so that they have openly admitted an alliance with arch foe, Israel, to combat what they see as the Iran growing dominance in the region—in Syria, in Lebanon, in Iraq.
  • This has all added up to an iron Saudi determination, aided by close Gulf Arab allies, to further crash oil prices until the expected wave of shale oil company bankruptcies—that was halted in January by Washington and Wall Street manipulations—finishes off the US shale oil competition. That day may come soon, but with unintended consequences for the entire global financial system at a time such consequences can ill be afforded. According to a recent report by Wall Street bank, Morgan Stanley, a major player in crude oil markets, OPEC oil producers have been aggressively increasing oil supply on the already glutted world market with no hint of a letup. In its report Morgan Stanley noted with visible alarm, “OPEC has added 1.5 million barrels/day to global supply in the last four months alone…the oil market is currently 800,000 barrels/day oversupplied. This suggests that the current oversupply in the oil market is fully due to OPEC’s production increase since February alone.” The Wall Street bank report adds the disconcerting note, “We anticipated that OPEC would not cut, but we didn’t foresee such a sharp increase.” In short, Washington has completely lost its strategic leverage over Saudi Arabia, a Kingdom that had been considered a Washington vassal ever since FDR’s deal to bring US oil majors in on an exclusive basis in 1945.
  • That breakdown in US-Saudi communication adds a new dimension to the recent June 18 high-level visit to St. Petersburg by Muhammad bin Salman, the Saudi Deputy Crown Prince and Defense Minister and son of King Salman, to meet President Vladimir Putin. The meeting was carefully prepared by both sides as the two discussed up to $10 billion of trade deals including Russian construction of peaceful nuclear power reactors in the Kingdom and supplying of advanced Russian military equipment and Saudi investment in Russia in agriculture, medicine, logistics, retail and real estate. Saudi Arabia today is the world’s largest oil producer and Russia a close second. A Saudi-Russian alliance on whatever level was hardly in the strategy book of the Washington State Department planners.…Oh shit! Now that OPEC oil glut the Saudis have created has cracked the shaky US effort to push oil prices back up. The price fall is being further fueled by fears that the Iran deal will add even more to the glut, and that the world’s second largest oil importer, China, may cut back imports or at least not increase them as their economy slows down. The oil market time bomb detonated in the last week of June. The US price of WTI oil went from $60 a barrel then, a level at which at least many shale oil producers can stay afloat a bit longer, to $49 on July 29, a drop of more than 18% in four weeks, tendency down. Morgan Stanley sounded loud alarm bells, stating that if the trend of recent weeks continues, “this downturn would be more severe than that in 1986. As there was no sharp downturn in the 15 years before that, the current downturn could be the worst of the last 45+ years. If this were to be the case, there would be nothing in our experience that would be a guide to the next phases of this cycle…In fact, there may be nothing in analyzable history.”
  • October is the next key point for bank decisions to roll-over US shale company loans or to keep extending credit on the (until now) hope that prices will slowly recover. If as strongly hinted, the Federal Reserve hikes US interest rates in September for the first time in the eight years since the global financial crisis erupted in the US real estate market in 2007, the highly-indebted US shale oil producers face disaster of a new scale. Until the past few weeks the volume of US shale oil production has remained at the maximum as shale producers desperately try to maximize cash flow, ironically, laying the seeds of the oil glut globally that will be their demise. The reason US shale oil companies have been able to continue in business since last November and not declare bankruptcy is the ongoing Federal Reserve zero interest rate policy that leads banks and other investors to look for higher interest rates in the so-called “High Yield” bond market. Back in the 1980’s when they were first created by Michael Millken and his fraudsters at Drexel Burnham Lambert, Wall Street appropriately called them “junk bonds” because when times got bad, like now for Shale companies, they turned into junk. A recent UBS bank report states, “the overall High-Yield market has doubled in size; sectors that witnessed more buoyant issuance in recent years, like energy and metals mining, have seen debt outstanding triple or quadruple.”
  • Assuming that the most recent downturn in WTI oil prices continues week after week into October, there well could be a panic run to sell billions of dollars of those High-Yield, high-risk junk bonds. As one investment analyst notes, “when the retail crowd finally does head for the exits en masse, fund managers will be forced to come face to face with illiquid secondary corporate credit markets where a lack of market depth…has the potential to spark a fire sale.” The problem is that this time, unlike in 2008, the Federal Reserve has no room to act. Interest rates are already near zero and the Fed has bought trillions of dollars of bank bad debt to prevent a chain-reaction US bank panic. One option that is not being discussed at all in Washington would be for Congress to repeal the disastrous 1913 Federal Reserve Act that gave control of our nation’s money to a gang of private bankers, and to create a public National Bank, owned completely by the United States Government, that could issue credit and sell Federal debt without the intermediaries of corrupt Wall Street bankers as the Constitution intended. At the same time they could completely nationalize the six or seven “Too Big To Fail” banks behind the entire financial mess that is destroying the foundations of the United States and by extension of the role of the dollar as world reserve currency, of most of the world.
  • Paul Merrell on 09 Aug 15
     
    I give a lot of credibility to this article's author when it comes to matters involving the oil market. Remember when reading that the only thing propping up the U.S. dollar is the Saudi (later extended to all OPEC nations) insistence that they be paid for their oil and natural gas in U.S. dollars, which creates artificial demand for the dollar globally. If the Gulf Coast States begin accepting payment in rubles or yuan, it is curtains for the U.S. dollar in global markets.  
Paul Merrell

Erdogan Says Will Resign If Oil Purchases From ISIS Proven After Putin Says Has "More P... - 0 views

www.zerohedge.com/...rkey-after-erdogan-slams-claim

war & peace Syria oil-smuggling ISIL Erdogan Turkey Russia

shared by Paul Merrell on 02 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • “I’ve shown photos taken from space and from aircraft which clearly demonstrate the scale of the illegal trade in oil and petroleum products,” Vladimir Putin told reporters earlier this month on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Antalya. Putin was of course referencing Islamic State’s illicit and highly lucrative oil trade, the ins and outs of which we’ve documented extensively over the past two weeks: The Most Important Question About ISIS That Nobody Is Asking Meet The Man Who Funds ISIS: Bilal Erdogan, The Son Of Turkey's President How Turkey Exports ISIS Oil To The World: The Scientific Evidence ISIS Oil Trade Full Frontal: "Raqqa's Rockefellers", Bilal Erdogan, KRG Crude, And The Israel Connection Turkey’s move to shoot down a Russian Su-24 warplane near the Syrian border afforded the Russian President all the motivation and PR cover he needed to expose Ankara’s alleged role in the trafficking of illegal crude from Iraq and Syria and in the aftermath of last Tuesday’s “incident,” Putin lambasted Erdogan. “Oil from Islamic State is being shipped to Turkey,” Putin said while in Jordan for a meeting with King Abdullah. In case that wasn’t clear enough, Putin added this: “Islamic State gets cash by selling oil to Turkey.”
  • To be sure, it’s impossible to track the path ISIS oil takes from extraction to market with any degree of precision. That said, it seems that Islamic State takes advantage of the same network of smugglers, traders, and shipping companies that the KRG uses to transport Kurdish crude from Kurdistan to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. From there, the oil makes its way to Israel and other markets (depending on which story you believe) and if anyone needs to be thrown off the trail along the way, there’s a ship-to-ship transfer trick that can be executed off the coast of Malta. The maneuver allegedly makes the cargoes more difficult to track.  Some believe Erdogan’s son Bilal - who owns a marine transport company called BMZ Group - is heavily involved in the trafficking of Kurdish and ISIS crude. Most of the ships BMZ owns are Malta-flagged.  In light of the above, some have speculated that Turkey shot down the Su-24 in retaliation for Russia’s bombing campaign that recently has destroyed over 1,000 ISIS oil trucks. Here’s what Syrian Information Minister Omran al-Zoub said on Friday:
  • “All of the oil was delivered to a company that belongs to the son of Recep [Tayyip] Erdogan. This is why Turkey became anxious when Russia began delivering airstrikes against the IS infrastructure and destroyed more than 500 trucks with oil already. This really got on Erdogan and his company’s nerves. They’re importing not only oil, but wheat and historic artefacts as well." Al-Zoub isn’t alone in his suspicions. In an interview with RT, Iraqi MP and former national security adviser, Mowaffak al Rubaie - who personally led Saddam to the gallows - said ISIS is selling around $100 million of stolen crude each month in Turkey. Here are some excerpts:  “In the last eight months ISIS has managed to sell ... $800 million dollars worth of oil on the black market of Turkey. This is Iraqi oil and Syrian oil, carried by trucks from Iraq, from Syria through the borders to Turkey and sold ...[at] less than 50 percent of the international oil price."   "Now this either get consumed inside, the crude is refined on Turkish territory by the Turkish refineries, and sold in the Turkish market. Or it goes to Jihan and then in the pipelines from Jihan to the Mediterranean and sold to the international market.”
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  • Hilariously, the man who just finished starting a civil war just so he could regain a few lost seats in Parliament and who would just as soon throw you in jail as look at you if he thinks you might be a threat to his government, now says he will resign if Putin (or anyone else) can present "proof": “We are not that dishonest as to buy oil from terrorists. If it is proven that we have, in fact, done so, I will leave office. If there is any evidence, let them present it, we’ll consider [it]."  Hold your breath on that. And so, the Turkey connection has been exposed and in dramatic fashion. Unfortunately for Ankara, Erdogan can't arrest Vladimir Putin like he can award winning journalists and honest police officers who, like Moscow, want to see the flow of money and weapons to Sunni militants in Syria cut off.  The real question is how NATO will react now that Turkey is quickly becoming a liability. Furthermore, you can be sure that the US, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar (who are all heavily invested in the Sunni extremist cause in Syria), are getting nervous. No one wants to see this blown wide open as that would mean the Western public getting wise to the fact that it is indeed anti-ISIS coalition governments that are funding and arming not only ISIS, but also al-Nusra and every other rebel group fighting to wrest control of the country from Assad. Worse, if it gets out that the reason the US has refrained from bombing ISIS oil trucks until now is due to the fact that Ankara and Washington had an understanding when it comes to the flow of illicit crude to Cehyan, the American public may just insist on indicting "some folks." 
  • On Monday, Putin was back at it, saying that Russia has obtained new information that further implicates Turkey in the Islamic State oil trade. “At the moment we have received additional information confirming that that oil from the deposits controlled by Islamic State militants enters Turkish territory on industrial scale," Putin said on the sidelines of the climate change summit in Paris. "We have traced some located on the territory of the Turkish Republic and living in regions guarded by special security services and police that have used the visa-free regime to return to our territory, where we continue to fight them." "We have every reason to believe that the decision to down our plane was guided by a desire to ensure security of this oil’s delivery routes to ports where they are shipped in tankers," he added, taking it up another notch still.  As for Erdogan, well, he "can't accept" the accusations which he calls "not moral": ERDOGAN: TURKEY CAN'T ACCEPT RUSSIA CLAIMS THAT IT BUYS IS OIL LATEST - Erdo?an: Russia’s claim that Turkey bought oil from Daesh is not ‘moral’, such claims have to be proved pic.twitter.com/PZka8MwzpL — DAILY SABAH (@DailySabah) November 30, 2015
  • lars generated by selling Iraqi and Syrian oil on the Turkish black market  is like the oxygen supply to ISIS and it’s operation,” he added. “Once you cut the oxygen then ISIS will suffocate.”   "There isn't a shadow of a doubt that the Turkish government knows about the oil smuggling operations. The merchants, the businessmen [are buying oil] in the black market in Turkey under the noses – under the auspices if you like – of the Turkish intelligence agency and the Turkish security apparatus."   “There are security officers who are sympathizing with ISIS in Turkey. They are allowing them to go from Istanbul to the borders and infiltrate ... Syria and Iraq.”   “There is no terrorist organization which can stand alone, without a neighboring country helping it – in this case Turkey.”
  • Remember, when it comes to criminal conspiracies, the guy who gets caught first usually ends up getting cut loose. It will be interesing to see if Erdogan starts to get the cold shoulder from Ankara's "allies" going forward.
Paul Merrell

ClubOrlov: Whiplash! - 0 views

cluborlov.blogspot.com/...whiplash.html

oil-market forecast pipelinestan-wars geopolitics

shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Over the course of 2014 the prices the world pays for crude oil have tumbled from over $125 per barrel to around $45 per barrel now, and could easily drop further before heading much higher before collapsing again before spiking again. You get the idea. In the end, the wild whipsawing of the oil market, and the even wilder whipsawing of financial markets, currencies and the rolling bankruptcies of energy companies, then the entities that financed them, then national defaults of the countries that backed these entities, will in due course cause industrial economies to collapse. And without a functioning industrial economy crude oil would be reclassified as toxic waste. But that is still two or three decades off in the future.
  • An additional problem is the very high depletion rate of “fracked” shale oil wells in the US. Currently, the shale oil producers are pumping flat out and setting new production records, but the drilling rate is collapsing fast. Shale oil wells deplete very fast: flow rates go down by half in just a few months, and are negligible after a couple of years. Production can only be maintained through relentless drilling, and that relentless drilling has now stopped. Thus, we have just a few months of glut left. After that, the whole shale oil revolution, which some bobbleheads thought would refashion the US into a new Saudi Arabia, will be over. It won't help that most of the shale oil producers, who speculated wildly on drilling leases, will be going bankrupt, along with exploration and production companies and oil field service companies. The entire economy that popped up in recent years around the shale oil patch in the US, which was responsible for most of the growth in high-paying jobs, will collapse, causing the unemployment rate to spike.
  • The game they are playing is basically a game of chicken. If everybody pumps all the oil they can regardless of the price, then at some point one of two things will happen: shale oil production will collapse, or other producers will run out of money, and their production will collapse. The question is, Which one of these will happen first? The US is betting that the low oil prices will destroy the governments of the three major oil producers that are not under their political and/or military control. These are Venezuela, Iran and, of course, Russia. These are long shots, but, having no other cards to play, the US is desperate. Is Venezuela enough of a prize? Previous attempts at regime change in Venezuela failed; why would this one succeed? Iran has learned to survive in spite of western sanctions, and maintains trade links with China, Russia and quite a few other countries to work around them. In the case of Russia, it is as yet unclear what fruit, if any, western policies against it will bear. For example, if Greece decides to opt out of the European Union in order to get around Russia's retaliatory sanctions against the EU, then it will become entirely unclear who has actually sanctioned whom.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The US is making a desperate attempt to knock over a petro-state or two or three before its shale oil runs out, with the Canadians, their tar sands now unprofitable, hitching a ride on its coat-tails, because if this attempt doesn't work, then it's lights out for the empire. But none of their recent gambits have worked. This is the winter of imperial discontent, and the empire is has been reduced to pulling pathetic little stunts that would be quite funny if they weren't also sinister and sad.
  • But a bunch of deluded people muttering to themselves in a dark corner, while the rest of the world points at them and laughs, does not an empire make. With this level of performance, I would venture to guess that nothing the empire tries from here on will work to its satisfaction.
  • Because it will recover. The fix for low oil prices is... low oil prices. Past some point high-priced producers will naturally stop producing, the excess inventory will get burned up, and the price will recover. Not only will it recover, but it will probably spike, because a country littered with the corpses of bankrupt oil companies is not one that is likely to jump right back into producing lots of oil while, on the other hand, beyond a few uses of fossil fuels that are discretionary, demand is quite inelastic. And an oil price spike will cause another round of demand destruction, because the consumers, devastated by the bankruptcies and the job losses from the collapse of the oil patch, will soon be bankrupted by the higher price. And that will cause the price of oil to collapse again. And so on until the last industrialist dies. His cause of death will be listed as “whiplash”: the “shaken industrialist syndrome,” if you will. Oil prices too high/low in rapid alternation will have caused his neck to snap.
  • Paul Merrell on 21 Jan 15
     
    Dmitry Orlov with a humorous yet inscisient take on the state and future of the oil market. Spoiler: He sees signs of desperation amongst the leaders of the American Empire, reduced to no viable options. 
  • Paul Merrell on 21 Jan 15
     
    "inscisient"? Make that "incisive." Follow reading Orlov's piece by reading Mike Whitney's latest at http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/01/20/are-plunging-petrodollar-revenues-behind-the-feds-projected-rate-hikes/ A lot of confirmation of what Orlov said in Whitney's article, citing hard numbers. Mass layoffs in the U.S. and Canadian oil industry; the petrodolar has stopped providing liquidity for the dollar; and the Fed plans to raise interest rates to force an influx of dollars from developing nations, in order to replace the petrodollar liquidity crisis. Whitney makes a strong case that it's a plot by the big banksters to steal another huge pile of cash at the expense of a huge number of jobs in the U.S. Both Orlov and Whitney say that it's going to be a very rough ride for the 99 per cent and for the population of developing nations. Indeed, Whitney's numbers say we are already over the precipice on jobs and well into free-fall.
  • Paul Merrell on 21 Jan 15
     
    But last night, Obama had the gall to claim that all is just peachy-k een on the jobs front. As he helps the banksters offshore another huge number of U.S. jobs.
Paul Merrell

Crude price drop triggers major layoffs in US oil industry - RT USA - 0 views

www.rt.com/...217959-us-oil-industry-prices

war & peace economic warfare U.S.-foreign-policy blowback oil-buttle

shared by Paul Merrell on 29 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Thousands of recently highly paid workers have been laid off after the oil price plummeted 50 percent in 2014. At least four American oil-producing states are already facing budget problems due to decreasing oil revenues. The price plunge has affected petroleum production in all oil-extracting countries, including the US.
  • For Texas, which has a far larger and more diversified economy than Louisiana, the oil price downturn is no good either. In just October and November Texas lost 2,300 oil and gas jobs, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics reported last week. Through the last half a year the state has been losing $83 million in potential revenue every day, the Greater Houston Partnership recently reported. They blamed this on crashing price of its West Texas Intermediate crude oil, which has depreciated to $54.73 per barrel this week, from more than $100 six months ago.
  • This doesn’t apply to the state of Alaska. According to the NYT, approximately 90 percent of state’s budget is formed from oil revenues. Alaska’s government is considering a 50 percent capital-spending cut for bridges and roads in the face of the oil price drop, with Moody’s, the credit rating service, lowering Alaska’s credit outlook from stable to negative. The state of Louisiana’s 2015-16 budget is going to be $1.4 billion short, with 162 state government positions already eliminated and more to be discontinued starting from January. Contracts and projects are being either reduced or frozen in state agencies. According to the state’s chief economist Greg Albrecht, for every $1 fall in price of an annual average barrel of oil, Louisiana loses $12 million.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Now according to Tom Runiewicz, a US industry economist at IHS Global Insight, if oil stays around $56 a barrel till the middle of the next year, companies providing services to oil and gas industry could lose 40,000 jobs by the end of 2015, while oil and gas equipment manufacturers could slash up to 6,000 jobs.
  • The situation in other oil-extracting states could be even worse. In a study published last year, the Council on Foreign Relations warned the largest job losses caused by sharp decline in oil prices are going to take place in North Dakota, Oklahoma and Wyoming, where the number of drilling rigs is decreasing.
  • Currently cheap fuel is still believed to be providing an overall boost to the US economy, as consumers can spend less on gasoline and more on shopping and services. But for the American energy sector the future looks less bright. It’s effecting places like Alaska, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas, the New York Times reports. US oil experts recall the 1980s oil price downturn, accompanied by economic disasters around the globe and arguably becoming one of the causes of the fall of the Soviet Union. Some experts are positive and say America’s oil-producing states won’t suffer too much because they “diversified their economies.”
  • These workers can earn more than $1,700 a week, much higher than the average $848 a week payment for other workers, the WSJ reported. When experienced workers lose their highly paid jobs, they stop paying their bills. There are also fears of a house-price slump. Fitch Ratings has already warned that with the price of oil continuing to plummet, home prices in Texas “may be unsustainable.”
  • Paul Merrell on 29 Dec 14
     
    The oil bubble is beginning to burst. Blowback. 
Paul Merrell

Baker Creating J Street Challenge for Jeb - Commentary Magazine Commentary Magazine - 0 views

www.commentarymagazine.com/...enge-for-jeb-bush-israel-obama

war & peace Auction 2016 Jeb-Bush neocons Baker

shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • The announcement that former Secretary of State James Baker was one of the advisors to Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign created a minor stir a few weeks ago. As our Michael Rubin noted at the time, Baker’s long record of hostility to Israel and consistent backing for engagement with rogue regimes ought to make him radioactive for a candidate seeking to brand himself as a supporter of the Jewish state and a critic of the Obama administration’s foreign policy. But Baker’s status as a faithful family retainer for the Bush family might have given Jeb a pass, especially since, as Michael wrote, another far wiser former secretary of state — George P. Schultz — is considered to be Jeb’s top foreign policy advisor. But the news that Baker will serve as a keynote speaker at the upcoming annual conference of the left-wing J Street lobby ought to change the conversation about this topic. Coming as it does hard on the heels of the president’s open threats to isolate Israel, having someone so closely associated with his campaign serve in that role at an event dedicated to support for Obama’s hostile attitude toward Israel obligates Jeb to not let this happen without saying or doing something to disassociate himself from Baker.
  • Paul Merrell on 21 Mar 15
     
    The neocons are howling about former Reagan Secretary of State James Baker being one of Jeb Bush's advisors. Baker has never been forgiven by the neocons since he barred the Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister -- Benjamin Netanyahu -- from being allowed into the State Dept. building because of his outrageous public statements. Now Baker is doubly hated because he is scheduled to be a keynote.  speaker at a conference of the liberal pro-Israel J Street lobbying group. J Street is "left-leaning" in neocon eyes because it actully supports a 2-state solution in Palestine, rather than using the 2-state solution as a political fig leaf while Israel completes its colonization of Palestine and then annexes it. But while screaming that only AIPAC represents Israel's real interests and acknowledging that Baker is closely tied to the Bush family, they're not addressing the political reality that Baker is the global oil industry's top lobbyist nor the fact that it was Baker who put the kibosh on the neocons' goal of privatizing all the oil in Iraq and flooding the market with cheap oil to break the OPEC Cartel. The western oil companies are profoundly against privately owned oil in the Mideast and even less enthused about breaking the OPEC Cartel, which normally keep crude oil prices high, enabling higher oil company profits. Apparently the oil industry also wants the 2-state solution to actually happen in order to obtain a more stable Middle East. And that is anathema to Netanyahu, AIPAC, and the neocons..   
Paul Merrell

OPEC, Russia and the New World Order Emerging | New Eastern Outlook - 0 views

m.journal-neo.org/...rging-new-world-order-emerging

economic-warfare OPEC NWO must-read

shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • By the day it’s becoming clearer that what I have recently been saying in my writings is coming to be. The OPEC oil-producing states of the Middle East, including Iran, through the skillful mediation of Russia, are carefully laying the foundations for a truly new world order. The first step in testing this will be if they collectively succeed in eliminating the threat to Syria of the Islamic State, and prepare the basis for serious, non-manipulated elections there.
  • In the political, more accurately geo-political sphere, we are now witnessing huge tectonic motion, and destructive it is not. It involves a new attractive force drawing the Middle East OPEC countries, including Saudi Arabia and Iran and other Arab OPEC countries, into what will soon become obvious as a strategic partnership with the Russian Federation. It transcends the huge religious divides today between Sunni Wahhabism, Sufi, Shi’ism, Orthodox Christianity. That tectonic motion will soon cause a political earthquake that well might save the planet from extinction by the endless wars the Pentagon and their string pullers on Wall Street and the military industrial complex and the loveless oligarchs who own them seem to have as their only strategy today.
  • In an interview with the London Financial Times, Russia’s most important oilman, Igor Sechin, CEO of the state-owned Rosneft, confirmed rumors that Saudi Arabia’s monarchy is seeking a formal market-share agreement with Russia, even going so far as offering Russia membership in OPEC, to stabilize world oil markets. In the interview, Sechin, considered one of President Vladimir Putin’s closest allies, confirmed the Saudi offer. The Financial Times (FT) is an influential media owned until this past July by the Pearson Group an asset tied to the Rothschild family who historically also dominate Royal Dutch Shell. The London paper chose to emphasize Sechin’s rejection of the Saudi offer. However, most instructive is to read between the lines of what he said. He told a Singapore commodities conference organized by the FT, “It needs to be recognised that Opec’s ‘golden age’ in the oil market has been lost. They fail to observe their own quotas [for Opec oil output]. If quotas had been observed, global oil markets would have been rebalanced by now.”
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  • Sechin well knows the background to the Saudi oil price war and the fact it was triggered by a meeting between US State Department’s John Kerry and the late Saudi King Abdullah in the desert Kingdom in September 2014, where Kerry reportedly urged the Saudis to crash oil prices. For Kerry the aim was to put unbearable pressure on Russia, then hit by US and EU financial sanctions. For the Saudis, it was a golden opportunity to eliminate the biggest disturbing factor in the OPEC domination of world oil markets–the booming production of US unconventional shale oil that had made the USA the world’s largest oil producer in 2014. Ironically, as Sechin told the FT, the US-Saudi deal and the US financial sanctions have backfired on the US strategists. The Russian ruble lost more than 50% of its dollar value by January 2015. Oil prices similarly fell from $103 a barrel in September 2014 to less than $50 today. But Russian oil production costs are calculated in rubles, not dollars. So, as Sechin states, the dollar cost of Rosneft oil production has dropped dramatically today from $5 a barrel before the sanctions to only $3 a barrel, a level similar to that of Arab OPEC producers like Saudi Arabia. Rosneft is not hurting despite sanctions. USA shale oil by contrast is unconventional and vastly more costly. Industry estimates depending on the shale field and the company, put costs of shale in a range of $60-80 a barrel just to break even. The current ongoing shakeout in the US shale industry and prospects of rising US interest rates dictate the demise of shale oil from the US for years if not decades to come as Wall Street lenders and shale company junk bond investors suffer huge losses.
  • Paul Merrell on 28 Sep 15
     
    A must-read.
Paul Merrell

Controversies - Insurance Industry Adjusts to Earthquake Risk Caused by Fracking - AllG... - 0 views

www.allgov.com/...risk-caused-by-fracking-150127

environment insurance fracking earthquakes

shared by Paul Merrell on 29 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • In another sign that fracking is increasingly being acknowledged as a cause of earthquakes, the insurance industry has announced that it is now linking the controversial drilling procedure with seismic activity in establishing its rates. Before insurance companies set their rates for an upcoming year, they turn to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) for information on quake activity. Specifically, insurers look at the USGS’s National Seismic Hazard Map, which “predicts where future earthquakes will occur, how often they will occur and how strongly they will shake the ground,” according to the Dallas Morning News. But this map will now take into account earthquakes that occur within the vicinity of fracking wells, the USGS has decided. That means insurance rates may go up in some areas considered more at risk of seismic events because of fracking operations. Between the years 2010 and 2013, central and eastern United States had an average of five times as many quakes per year as between 1970 and 2000. Human activity, including fracking, has been cited by scientists as the cause, according to Dallas Morning News.
  • Last year, USGS connected a 5.7-magnitude quake in Oklahoma to that state’s robust fracking industry. “The observation that a human-induced earthquake can trigger a cascade of earthquakes, including a larger one, has important implications for reducing the seismic risk from wastewater injection,” USGS seismologist and coauthor of the study Elizabeth Cochran said at the time. More than 120 quakes have hit the Dallas area in the past six years, and scientists have cited the work performed at nearby fracking sites as the reason, according to Homeland Security News Wire. Even the Texas Oil & Gas Association agreed that some research into the nexus of fracking and quakes is called for. “The oil and natural gas industry agrees that recent seismic activity warrants robust investigation to determine the precise location, impact and cause or causes of seismic events,” Todd Staples, the association’s president, said in a statement. A study published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America says fracking near Ohio’s Poland Township triggered a previously undiscovered fault. The result was more than 70 earthquakes ranging in magnitude of 2.1 to 3.0, the latter of which was described as “rare” by the experts.
  • Paul Merrell on 29 Jan 15
     
    Yet another factor to contribute to the piercing of the shale oil bubble in the U.S. economy.The shale oil and gas industry in the U.S. is collapsing because its production costs can not result in profits when the price of oil is so low. Banksters have ended the flow of new well development funding. Shale oil development companies are going bankrupt by the dozens  and tens of thousands of shale oil workers have been laid off.  
Gary Edwards

The Libertarian View: Are Tariffs Bad? - 1 views

www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php

Libertarian Austrian-Economics Tariffs-NAFTA China Ron-Paul

shared by Gary Edwards on 26 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 26 Jan 12
     
    As many know, i spent quite a bit of time working for a Chinese Company seeking to enter the USA-European software market.  My task was to research the market, discover and define a market opportunity, design the product, and then work as product manager to get that service to market.  I took this job to better understand the Chinese marketplace and how sovereign Chinese companies work.  What i learned is how the Chinese seek to exploit and totally dominate open markets.  Software is just a category whose time has come.  and there are thousands of Chinese companies lining up.  The first step though is to fine tune the existing blueprint used by other Sina sovereigns.  amazing stuff. My take away from this experience is that the USA MUST set up a 30% tariff on ALL imports, and do so IMMEDIATELY!!!  Yesterday is not soon enough! As a newly minted libertarian, i wondered about the obvious conflict with Austrian Economics and their dedication to free markets and free trade?  I found the answer at this Libertarian forum, where many members were in heated discussion.  Comment #7 sums it up best i think.  Including a link to Ron Paul's Tariff-NAFTA speech. The thing is, the 30% Tariff should be part of an overall TAX REDUCTION PLAN.  I support the FAIR TAX and the Balanced Budget Amendment.  As an alternative to the Fair Tax, I would also support a 17% flat tax with no exceptions.  The ideal situation being an immediate, uncompromising, no exceptions 30% tariff on ALL imports coupled with the Fair Tax and the Balanced Budget Amendment.   And yes, i do believe this plan is consistent with the Founding Fathers Constitution.  But it took some kind of research to establish that opinion.   I've also concluded that "conservatism" is a convenient philosophical vehicle for the corrupt crony corporatism of both the military-industrial-complex, banksters and, international corporations.  Free trade and open markets concepts are perverted to become a thin veil
Paul Merrell

Venezuela and Russia Reach $14 Billion Oil and Gas Deal | venezuelanalysis.com - 0 views

venezuelanalysis.com/11400

war & peace economic-warfare Russia Venezuela oil-gas-development

shared by Paul Merrell on 30 May 15 - No Cached
  • Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro concluded an agreement with Russia's state-owned Rosneft that will see an additional $14 billion in investment in the South American country's oil and gas industry over the coming years.    The move was announced by the socialist leader on Wednesday following a meeting he convened between the president of Venezuela's state oil company PDVSA, Eulogio de Pino, and Rosneft president Igor Sechin.    "We had a great meeting and agreed on investment of over $14 billion,” declared Maduro in a television address from Miraflores palace.    The new investment will reportedly go towards further developing Venezuela's Orinoco Belt in the country's northeast, which is home to some of the worlds largest reserves of crude oil and already contains 250 oil fields. PDVSA aims to double Venezuela's oil output to 6 million barrels a day by 2019, four million of which are to come from the Orinoco Belt. 
  • Speaking from the 9th meeting of the High Level Intergovernmental Commission in Moscow, Venezuelan foreign minister Delcy Rodriguez expressed her solidarity with Russia, affirming that both Venezuela and Russia "have become victims of unconventional war".    "We are convinced that we share the same idea about what is occuring on the global level. Just as the Soviets did their best to overcome the Nazis, today Russia is battling with all its strength to navigate a new geopolitical power structure that permits it to reduce the hegemony and expansionism of imperialism."
  • Paul Merrell on 30 May 15
     
    Interesting. Are China, Russia, and Venezuela getting positioned to drive down the price of oil produced by the Gulf Coast States that is only sold for U.S. dollars? China has already invested mightily in Venezuela's oil and gas infrastructure. Note that it's unlikely that Russia and Venezuela could pull off such a move without heavy subsidies from China. (This deal is seemingly against Russia's interests in its revenue from its own gas and oil.) 
Paul Merrell

Energy companies planning more layoffs - Business Insider - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/s-planning-more-layoffs-2015-7

economy oil-prices crash jobs

shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • The oil crash is not over. For a few weeks, oil prices climbed and stabilized, and it looked as if the worst of the oil crash were finally ebbing away. After reaching the lows of the year in mid-March, West Texas Intermediate crude oil gained about 50%, steadily climbing, first back to $60 a barrel. But by the first week of July, oil had started to slide again until it finally crashed into a bear market, defined as 20% decline from recent highs. And now energy companies are saying the same things we heard months ago.
  • In a story on Sunday, The Wall Street Journal's Lynn Cook reported that with oil prices hitting new lows, US energy companies were planning to cut more jobs and sell more assets — the same tactics they employed to cope with the first wave of the crash.
  • Morgan Stanley thinks this could be the worst oil crash in 45 years
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  • According to The Journal, the drilling giants Halliburton and Baker Hughes have now cut more than twice the number of jobs they disclosed in February — about 27,000 in total. And as we noted last week, Baker Hughes warned in its earnings release that it expected tough market conditions to continue "across all segments" for the rest of 2015. The company also did not forecast a rebound in oil prices.
Paul Merrell

Oil-price scenarios: Good, bad and ugly - Business - CBC News - 0 views

www.cbc.ca/...os-good-bad-and-ugly-1.2997386

pipelinestan-wars oil-forecast Iran-negotiations

shared by Paul Merrell on 18 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • As the price of oil trades at a six-year low, there’s no consensus on what the rest of the year will bring for crude. But there are many different forecasts. Here are three scenarios being considered by commodity strategists.
  • Paul Merrell on 18 Mar 15
     
    After a short interregnum of stability when the price of oil settled around $50 per barrel, the market has once again gone wonky with oil hitting a six-year low of $42 per barrel. The possibility of a deal with Iran and the easing of sanctions has many worried that the floor could drop below $30. Here are three likely scenarios: The Good: OPEC cuts in June and the glut is curtailed. The Bad: No OPEC cut, but storage levels aren't exceeded, which means the glut isn't clogging the system and drowning producers in oil. The Ugly: Storage tanks do fill up, producers have no place to send their excess crude and sanctions on Iran are eased. That would drown the market. So there' are oil industry interests that gets gored if Iran sanctions are removed too soon. That goes a long way toward explaining thedepth of resistance to the Iran negotiations. I.e., apparently it's more than the Israel Lobby. 
Gary Edwards

Generals conclude Obama backed al-Qaida - 0 views

www.wnd.com/...conclude-obama-backed-al-qaida

Benghazi

shared by Gary Edwards on 13 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 13 Mar 15
     
    Petrodollars. Obama has lost Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Yemen to Al-Queda / Muslim Brotherhood extremists. He has nearly lost Egypt and Syria. They hang by a thread. We could see this as an Islamic revolution trying to overtake the despots that have ruled the middle East since the WWI break up of the Ottoman Empire, and shamelessly enriched themselves in petrodollars in the process. Or, we could look at this as religious war between Sunni and Shiite Islamic factions, with Iran leading the Shiites, and the Saudis leading the Sunnis. Except, that divide doesn't seem to gel with the idea of a Shiite Muslim Brotherhood alliance with a Sunni Al-Queda. For sure though, Iran has taken over the formerly Sunni led Iraq and is now executing any and all Sunni rebels. Including all of Saddam Hussein's Revolutionary Guard members now fighting in northern Irag and Syria as ISIL. With the help, air cover and weapons provided by Obama, the Muslim Brotherhood has taken over Libya, and nearly took Egypt. The only way of looking at this mess and making sense of it is through the lens of petrodollars and pipelines. Gadafi, Saddam Husein, the Shah of Iran, and Bashir in Syria all have one thing in common: they were selling oil and accepting payment in something other than petrodollars. They were building pipelines for the shipment of non petrodollar oil. I don't expect Iraq or Lybian oil to ever return to market. Civil war will keep that oil in the ground; making the petrodollar bankers and oligarchs very very wealthy, and the USA-NATO military industrial complex very busy profiting from the sale of war making machinery. ..................................... "The Obama White House and the State Department under the management of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton "changed sides in the war on terror" in 2011 by implementing a policy of facilitating the delivery of weapons to the al-Qaida-dominated rebel militias in Libya attempting to oust Moammar Gadhafi from powe
Paul Merrell

Russia Abandons PetroDollar By Opening Reserve Fund - 0 views

oilprice.com/...r-By-Opening-Reserve-Fund.html

war & peace economic-warfare Russia U.S. 2015 oil-forecast

shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • 2015 has not been good to Russia; the spread between Brent and WTI is gone in anticipation of US exports and both benchmarks have flirted with sub $45 prices. A hostage to such prices, the ruble has yet to begin its turnaround and the state’s finances are in extreme disarray. President Vladimir Putin’s approval ratings remain sky-high, but his country has not faced such difficult times since he took office more than 15 years ago. Since the turn of the new year the ruble has fallen over 13 percent and Russia’s central bank and finance department are running out of options – to date, policy makers have hiked interest rates to their highest level since the 1998 Russian financial crisis and embarked on a 1 trillion-ruble ($15 billion) bank recapitalization plan to little effect. Their latest, and most dramatic, plan is to abandon the dollar – at least somewhat.
  • In late December, the Kremlin ordered five large state-owned exporters – including oil and gas giants Rosneft and Gazprom – to sell their foreign currency reserves. Specifically, the companies must bring their foreign reserves to October levels by the beginning of March. To comply, the exporters may have to sell a combined $1 billion per day until March. Private companies have not yet been hit by these soft capital controls, but have instead been advised to manage their foreign exchange maneuvers responsibly. More recently, the Kremlin announced it will open its $88 billion sovereign wealth fund and flip it for rubles. The plan will see Russia convert as much as $8 billion to rubles (~500 billion) over a two-month span and place them in deposits for banks. Overall, the move will provide the Russian economy with some much needed liquidity and could speed up the healing if oil were to rebound, but it sends the wrong signals to investors and Economy Minister Alexei Ulyukaev believes the country’s credit rating will soon be marked below investment grade.
  • In any case, the move does little for the country’s ailing oil industry. The domestic market is projected to shrink amid the economic slowdown, and competition for market share abroad is increasingly competitive. Production forecasts are no rosier and the EIA predicts Russian crude production growth will be among the worst performers in both 2015 and 2016 – contrasted by continued growth in North America. Russia’s gas industry has fared no better. Gazprom’s 2014 output was historically awful and LNG is ever more a counter to the country’s pipeline politics.
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  • While Russia likely envisioned abandoning its dollars under far better circumstances, the news is just as worrying for the United States and its dollar hegemony. Along with Russia, energy exporters worldwide are pulling their petrodollars out of world financial markets and other USD-denominated assets in favor of greater, and certainly necessary, spending domestically. In the past, these dollars have given life to the loan market and helped fund debt among energy importers, contributing to overall growth.
  • Petrodollar exports – otherwise known as petrodollar recycling – were negative in 2014 for the first time in nearly two decades. The result is falling global market liquidity, record low US Treasury rates, and higher borrowing costs for everyone – a tough pill to swallow for energy producers if oil prices remain low. The US dollar remains the global reserve currency for now, but the fact remains that nations are increasingly transacting on their own terms, and often times without the USD.
  • Paul Merrell on 19 Jan 15
     
    Re: "EIA predicts Russian crude production growth will be among the worst performers in both 2015 and 2016 - contrasted by continued growth in North America." That's not what is being reported. Many shale oil production facilities are no longer profitable in North America and credit for new efforts has completely dried up. And unless Congress can raise enough votes in both houses to overried Obama's promised veto of a bill to alow construction of the KXL Pipeline, Most of Canada's new oil production capacity will never reach the market. (Canada has ruled out pipelines from the Alberta tar sands to its own ocean coasts, so there is no alternative to KXL.)
Paul Merrell

Free Syrian Army to Sputnik: We Have Proof of Turkey's Oil Deals With Daesh - 0 views

sputniknews.com/...turkey-oil-daesh-proof.html

war & peace Turkey ISIL oil-smuggling Free-Syrian-Army

shared by Paul Merrell on 04 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Major-General Hosam Al-Awak of the Intelligence Service at the Free Syrian Army has confirmed to Sputnik Arabic that they have the proof of crude oil purchases by Turkey from Daesh (also known as ISIL/ISIS) in Syria and Iraq.Major-General Hosam Al-Awak has confirmed to Sputnik Arabic that the Free Syrian Army (FSA) has photos of the oil deals and contracts signed by a Turkish party to buy oil from Daesh (also known as ISIL/ISIS) terror organization, which controls large areas in Syria and Iraq.
  • “Since the very start of the Syrian crisis in 2011, Turkey has been supporting the Islamists (extremists) and terrorists in Syria in every possible way against moderate groups,” he added. “We have photos of the contracts of oil deals signed between the Turkish party and Daesh… We also have photos of [buying] vehicles – Toyota cars bought by Qatar, which have the name of “al-ghanem” – [which] entered Syria along with armored vehicles used by militants of Daesh for their leaders’ transportation.”
  • “We noticed that extremist Islamic factions gain support from Turkey before the emergence of “Daesh”…. This support reached them through Qorsayah Mountain, near to Bawabet as-Salam on the Turkish-Syrian borders.” The Major-General also explained that the Turkish intelligence service used these deals (signed with the extremist parties) for other purposes – it obtained facilities from those parties, so that they “could steal factories and laboratories in Aleppo for the benefit of the Turkish companies.” Hosam Al-Awak noted that the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria was supervising these organizations and coordinating with them, in order to put an end to the Free Syrian Army and other moderate groups. The Major-General stressed that his groups held the Head of the Turkish Intelligence Hakan Baydan accountable [for the deals] and added that they showed the evidence to their friends in the region and in the world, however, President Erdogan of Turkey insists on supporting extremism, Islamist parties and terror organizations in the region.
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  • “We believe that Russia is the rational party in the world. In terms of the Syrian cause, Russians could cooperate better with all moderate parties and factions, including the Free Syrian Army.” The officer said that he believes that the Russian intervention into Syria could achieve better results and promised to “maintain Russian interests in Syria in the future.” This is only the latest evidence to come to light of Ankara's oil contacts with the jihadist group, which have been vehemently denied by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Erdogan even vowed to leave office if any proof is provided that Turkey has been buying oil from the terrorist group. His comments, in turn, came in response to President Putin's remarks that Moscow has evidence that the Su-24 was shot down by Turkey to protect Daesh oil deliveries, and that oil from the fields it controls is being exported to Turkey on an industrial scale.
Paul Merrell

Fear And Loathing in the House of Saud - 0 views

sputniknews.com/...ear-loathing-saudi-arabia.html

war & peace Saudis Iran U.S.-foreign-policy Saudi-desperation tipping-point

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Riyadh was fully aware the beheading of respected Saudi Shi'ite cleric Nimr al-Nimr was a deliberate provocation bound to elicit a rash Iranian response. The Saudis calculated they could get away with it; after all they employ the best American PR machine petrodollars can buy, and are viscerally defended by the usual gaggle of nasty US neo-cons.    In a post-Orwellian world "order" where war is peace and "moderate" jihadis get a free pass, a House of Saud oil hacienda cum beheading paradise — devoid of all civilized norms of political mediation and civil society participation — heads the UN Commission on Human Rights and fattens the US industrial-military complex to the tune of billions of dollars while merrily exporting demented Wahhabi/Salafi-jihadism from MENA (Middle East-Northern Africa) to Europe and from the Caucasus to East Asia. 
  • And yet major trouble looms. Erratic King Salman's move of appointing his son, the supremely arrogant and supremely ignorant Prince Mohammad bin Salman to number two in the line of succession has been contested even among Wahhabi hardliners. But don't count on petrodollar-controlled Arab media to tell the story. English-language TV network Al-Arabiyya, for instance, based in the Emirates, long financed by House of Saud members, and owned by the MBC conglomerate, was bought by none other than Prince Mohammad himself, who will also buy MBC. With oil at less than $40 a barrel, largely thanks to Saudi Arabia's oil war against both Iran and Russia, Riyadh's conventional wars are taking a terrible toll. The budget has collapsed and the House of Saud has been forced to raise taxes. The illegal war on Yemen, conducted with full US acquiescence, led by — who else — Prince Mohammad, and largely carried out by the proverbial band of mercenaries, has instead handsomely profited al-Qaeda in the Arabic Peninsula (AQAP), just as the war on Syria has profited mostly Jabhat al-Nusra, a.k.a. al-Qaeda in Syria.
  • Saudi Arabia is essentially a huge desert island. Even though the oil hacienda is bordered by the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, the Saudis don't control what matters: the key channels of communication/energy exporting bottlenecks — the Bab el-Mandeb and the Straits of Hormuz, not to mention the Suez canal. Enter US "protection" as structured in a Mafia-style "offer you can't refuse" arrangement; we guarantee safe passage for the oil export flow through our naval patrols and you buy from us, non-stop, a festival of weapons and host our naval bases alongside other GCC minions. The "protection" used to be provided by the former British empire. So Saudi Arabia — as well as the GCC — remains essentially an Anglo-American satrapy.          Al Sharqiyya — the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia — holds only 4 million people, the overwhelming majority Shi'ites. And yet it produces no less than 80% of Saudi oil. The heart of the action is the provincial capital Al Qatif, where Nimr al-Nimr was born. We're talking about the largest oil hub on the planet, consisting of 12 crisscrossed pipelines that connect to massive Gulf oil terminals such as Dhahran and Ras Tanura.
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  • Enter the strategic importance of neighboring Bahrain. Historically, all the lands from Basra in southern Iraq to the peninsula of Musandam, in Oman — traditional trade posts between Europe and India — were known as Bahrain ("between two seas"). Tehran could easily use neighboring Bahrain to infiltrate Al Sharqiyya, detach it from Riyadh's control, and configure a "Greater Bahrain" allied with Iran. That's the crux of the narrative peddled by petrodollar-controlled media, the proverbial Western "experts", and incessantly parroted in the Beltway.  
  • There's no question Iranian hardliners cherish the possibility of a perpetual Bahraini thorn on Riyadh's side. That would imply weaponizing a popular revolution in Al Sharqiyya.  But the fact is not even Nimr al-Nimr was in favor of a secession of Al Sharqiyya.  And that's also the view of the Rouhani administration in Tehran. Whether disgruntled youth across Al Sharqiyya will finally have had enough with the beheading of al-Nimr it's another story; it may open a Pandora's box that will not exactly displease the IRGC in Tehran.   But the heart of the matter is that Team Rouhani perfectly understands the developing Southwest Asia chapter of the New Great Game, featuring the re-emergence of Iran as a regional superpower; all of the House of Saud's moves, from hopelessly inept to major strategic blunder, betray utter desperation with the end of the old order.  
  • That spans everything from an unwinnable war (Yemen) to a blatant provocation (the beheading of al-Nimr) and a non sequitur such as the new Islamic 34-nation anti-terror coalition which most alleged members didn't even know they were a part of.  The supreme House of Saud obsession rules, drenched in fear and loathing: the Iranian "threat". Riyadh, which is clueless on how to play geopolitical chess — or backgammon — will keep insisting on the oil war, as it cannot even contemplate a military confrontation with Tehran. And everything will be on hold, waiting for the next tenant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue; will he/she be tempted to pivot back to Southwest Asia, and cling to the old order (not likely, as Washington relies on becoming independent from Saudi oil)? Or will the House of Saud be left to its own — puny — devices among the shark-infested waters of hardcore geopolitics?
  • Paul Merrell on 10 Jan 16
     
    If Pepe Escobar has this right (and I've never known him to be wrong), the world is a tipping point in Saudi influence on the world stage with U.S. backing for continued Saudi exercise of power in the Mideast unlikely and with Iran as the beneficiary.  Unfortunately, Escobar did not discuss why this is true despite the Saudis critical role in propping up the U.S. economy via the petro-dollar. That the U.S. would abandon the petro-dollar at this point in history seems unlikely to say the least. Does Obama believe that Iran would be willing to occupy that Saudi role? Many unanswered questions here. But the fact that Escobar says these changes are in process counts heavily with me. 
Paul Merrell

Israel Grants Oil Rights in Syria to Murdoch and Rothschild - Craig Murray - 0 views

www.craigmurray.org.uk/...yria-to-murdoch-and-rothschild

war & peace Israel Golan-Heights oil Genie-Energy

shared by Paul Merrell on 31 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • srael has granted oil exploration rights inside Syria, in the occupied Golan Heights, to Genie Energy. Major shareholders of Genie Energy – which also has interests in shale gas in the United States and shale oil in Israel – include Rupert Murdoch and Lord Jacob Rothschild. This from a 2010 Genie Energy press release: Claude Pupkin, CEO of Genie Oil and Gas, commented, “Genie’s success will ultimately depend, in part, on access to the expertise of the oil and gas industry and to the financial markets. Jacob Rothschild and Rupert Murdoch are extremely well regarded by and connected to leaders in these sectors. Their guidance and participation will prove invaluable.” “I am grateful to Howard Jonas and IDT for the opportunity to invest in this important initiative,” Lord Rothschild said. “Rupert Murdoch’s extraordinary achievements speak for themselves and we are very pleased he has agreed to be our partner. Genie Energy is making good technological progress to tap the world’s substantial oil shale deposits which could transform the future prospects of Israel, the Middle East and our allies around the world.” For Israel to seek to exploit mineral reserves in the occupied Golan Heights is plainly illegal in international law. Japan was succesfully sued by Singapore before the International Court of Justice for exploitation of Singapore’s oil resources during the second world war. The argument has been made in international law that an occupying power is entitled to opeate oil wells which were previously functioning and operated by the sovereign power, in whose position the occupying power now stands. But there is absolutely no disagreement in the authorities and case law that the drilling of new wells – let alone fracking – by an occupying power is illegal.
  • Israel tried to make the same move twenty years ago but was forced to back down after a strong reaction from the Syrian government, which gained diplomatic support from the United States. Israel is now seeking to take advantage of the weakened Syrian state; this move perhaps casts a new light on recent Israeli bombings in Syria. In a rational world, the involvement of Rothschild and Murdoch in this international criminal activity would show them not to be fit and proper persons to hold major commercial interests elsewhere, and action would be taken. Naturally, nothing of the kind will happen.
  • Paul Merrell on 31 Mar 16
     
    From Wikipedia: "Genie Energy's Strategic advisory board is composed of: Dick Cheney (former vice president of the United States), Jacob Rothschild, 4th Baron Rothschild, Rupert Murdoch (media mogul and chairman of News Corp), James Woolsey (former CIA director), Larry Summers (former head of the US Treasury), and Bill Richardson, an ex-ambassador to the United Nations and energy secretary."
Paul Merrell

U.S. expands secret facility in Iraq - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - 0 views

www.post-gazette.com/...201407120083

war & peace Iraq Kurds CIA

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • IRBIL, Iraq — A supposedly secret but locally well-known CIA station on the outskirts of Irbil’s airport is undergoing rapid expansion as the United States considers whether to engage in a war against Islamist militants who have seized control of half of Iraq in the past month. Western contractors hired to expand the facility and a local intelligence official confirmed the construction project, which is visible from the main highway linking Irbil to Mosul, the city whose fall June 9 triggered the Islamic State’s sweep through northern and central Iraq. Residents around the airport say they can hear daily what they suspect are U.S. drones taking off and landing at the facility. Expansion of the facility comes as it seems all but certain that the autonomous Kurdish regional government and the central government in Baghdad, never easy partners, are headed for an irrevocable split — complicating any U.S. military hopes of coordinating the two entities’ efforts against the Islamic State.
  • Overnight, Kurdish troops seized oil fields operated by Iraq’s Northern Oil Co., whose exports had been controlled by the central government, “These two are among the main wells producing oil in Iraq,” said Assam Jihad, the Oil Ministry spokesman. “They are the spine of Iraq’s oil wealth and produce 400,000 barrels a day.” Oil industry publications said they had produced a little less than half that in recent months, but nonetheless represent a significant share of Iraq’s oil production. In 2012, Iraq produced on average of 3 million barrels of oil per day, according to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. “Half of this production goes to the local market, and the other half goes for export,” said Mr. Jihad, criticizing the Kurds’ seizure of the field as a “constitutional breach” and “violation of Iraq’s sovereignty.”
  • The developments all come as the United States, which has said it won’t come to Iraq’s assistance unless Mr. Maliki takes steps to make his government more inclusive, is expected to announce early next week its assessment of the military situation in the country. Pentagon officials said the assessment might be made public as soon as Monday. But U.S. officials have known for some time that it was likely that they would need to coordinate any steps taken in Baghdad and in Irbil, where the peshmerga has worked closely over the years with the CIA, U.S. special forces and the Joint Special Operations Command, the military’s most secretive task force, which has become a bulwark of counterterrorism operations. Peshmerga forces already are manning checkpoints and bunkers to protect the facility, which sits just a few hundred yards from the highway.
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  • Other contractors who deal extensively with moving heavy equipment through Irbil’s airport, which has supported a rapidly expanding oil and gas drilling industry, said they were aware of the expansion. One British oil executive said he’d detected a “low-key but steady stream of men, equipment and supplies for an obvious expansion of the facility.” The local Kurdish intelligence official described what was taking place as a “long-term relationship with the Americans.” In a statement July 3, U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel announced that Irbil would host such a center, in addition to one being set up in Baghdad, and suggested that it had already begun operating. “We have personnel on the ground in Irbil, where our second joint operations center has achieved initial operating capability,” he said then.
  • “It’s no secret that the American special forces and CIA have a close relationship with the peshmerga,” said the Kurdish official, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because he was discussing covert military operations. He added that the facility had operated even “after the Americans were forced out of Iraq by Maliki,” a reference to the 2011 U.S. troop withdrawal after the Obama administration and the Iraqi government couldn’t agree on a framework for U.S. forces remaining in the country. The official refused to directly identify the location of the facility but when he was shown the blurred-out location on an online satellite-mapping service he joked, “The peshmerga do not have the influence to make Google blur an area on these maps. I will leave the rest to your conclusions.”
  • Paul Merrell on 13 Jul 14
     
    Two CIA drone bases in Iraq; what could be wrong with that? Remember that CIA staff and contractors, being civilians, aren't included in the head count of American boots on the ground. And the CIA is rather notorious these days for operating drones that kill, not the observation drones that the Pentagon said it would be flying over Iraq.  Smells like Obama has decided to run a hot war in Iraq, at least of the covert variety. 
Paul Merrell

Oil And Gas Sector Troubles Drive Corporate Default Rate To Highest Level In Seven Year... - 0 views

www.ibtimes.com/t-level-seven-years-sp-2350598

economy corporate-defaults gas-oil-industry

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • The troubled oil and gas industry has been a big factor in driving global corporate defaults to their highest rate in seven years.Four more companies defaulted this week, bringing the overall tally to 40 so far this year, the ratings agency Standard & Poor’s said Friday in a research note. The last time defaults hit such heights was in the depths of the global recession in 2009.About one-third of that total, or 14 defaults, came from oil and gas companies, which are struggling to pay off debt acquired when oil prices were higher. U.S. crude prices are down more than 60 percent from their June 2014 peak of $105 a barrel, trading at around $39 a barrel Friday. Investors now face tens of billions of dollars in energy defaults as the worst oil crash in decades leaves drillers struggling to stay afloat.
  • Paul Merrell on 13 Apr 16
     
    In related news, the nation's largest coal company, Peabody Coal, just filed for bankruptcy. Several other coal companies already have, indicative of plummeting markets and prices for coal. 
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