Spain gets Mugged again!

[Mega]

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-0...electrica.html

Its times like this i understand WHY America has 13 Aircralf carries, CIA,NSA etc.....just in case of an "Miss-under-standings" about whom owns what.
Mike

[flintlock]

Re: Spain gets Mugged again!

Okay show me where the US comes into this story Mike? Now I hate American Imperialism as much as anyone, but if anything the US has been fighting this kind of thing for years with those Carriers. Bolivia is on the opposite end of the ideological spectrum from the US in this case. That's not to say the US doesn't intimidate other nations with it's military in some cases, but they certainly are not nationalizing power plants with it. Fascists are smarter than Socialists in that regard. They know it's better to control industry than to own it.

Now does "might make right"? Certainly, since the beginning of time. That fact stretches across the entire ideological spectrum. Socialists, Fascists, Communists, and Capitalists. They all have a powerful military or police apparatus to enforce their will.

[Mega]

Re: Spain gets Mugged again!

Now, the last time someone tried to Nationise an American company, i think it was Chile in early 70's.....i wonder how that went?

[dcarrigg]

Re: Spain gets Mugged again!

Now, the last time someone tried to Nationise an American company, i think it was Chile in early 70's.....

Or Nicaragua or El Salvatore in the 80s. Maybe Chavez in '02 depending on who you believe.

I think it's basically well known that all CIA coups are in response to the nationalization of some industry or another. Despite the MSM storyline, they don't care about rhetoric. They care about dollar signs. And that makes sense on most levels.

[GRG55]

Re: Spain gets Mugged again!

Or Nicaragua or El Salvatore in the 80s. Maybe Chavez in '02 depending on who you believe.

I think it's basically well known that all CIA coups are in response to the nationalization of some industry or another. Despite the MSM storyline, they don't care about rhetoric. They care about dollar signs. And that makes sense on most levels.

It always comes down to the Dollar :-)

But I really would appreciate if one of you bright lights can explain to us dimbulbs why almost all the oil contracts in Iraq are going to "non-American" oil companies like Royal-Dutch Shell, BP, the Russians, the Chinese, etc.??? It's not as though the USA doesn't have a massive military presence in the region...

[globaleconomicollaps]

Re: Spain gets Mugged again!

It always comes down to the Dollar :-)

But I really would appreciate if one of you bright lights can explain to us dimbulbs why almost all the oil contracts in Iraq are going to "non-American" oil companies like Royal-Dutch Shell, BP, the Russians, the Chinese, etc.??? It's not as though the USA doesn't have a massive military presence in the region...

Really? Wow. Do you have a link for this?

[GRG55]

Re: Spain gets Mugged again!

Really? Wow. Do you have a link for this?

I thought this situation in Iraq was well known, especially by the always informed iTulip crowd. I really do wonder when Americans are going to start asking their politicians why their young sons are dying in foreign deserts...

USA companies are certainly not completely excluded. There is no one link, but here's a few extracted snippets. Please note that not every contract awarded reached a final concluded negotiation, and Iraqi politics being what it is, some of these fields were re-auctioned when the original deals fell through. Nevertheless the USA companies seem to be playing a minor role in the country. A Google search will doubtless provide you with more examples.

...Italy's Eni SpA, with California's Occidental Petroleum and the Korea Gas Corp, was awarded Iraq's Zubair oil field with estimated reserves of 4.4 billion barrels...

...BP and CNPC [China National Petroleum Corporation] finalised the first new oil contract issued by Baghdad for the largest oil field in the country, the 17 billion barrel super giant Rumaila field...

...Iraq’s deputy oil minister, Ahmed al-Shamma, said that Iraq still hopes to award a contract for the development of the 4.4 billion barrel Nassiriya oil field and the construction of a dedicated 300,000 bpd export refinery as one package.
Iraq excluded Nassiriya from its three previous bidding rounds for oil and gas licences.
According to Platts, Baghdad had been in drawn-out negotiations with a consortium led by Japan’s Nippon Oil to develop the field, but the ministry eventually assigned management of the field to the state-run South Oil Company...Nippon Oil, Spain’s Repsol, Italy’s Eni, and US firm Chevron have all submitted proposals to develop the field...

.. Shell was the lead partner with Malaysia's Petroliam Nasional Bhd., or Petronas, winning a contract for the super-giant Majnoon field, one of the largest in the world, with estimated reserves of up to 25 billion."....

...On November 27, 38 months after Royal Dutch Shell announced its pursuit of a massive gas deal in southern Iraq, the oil giant had its contract signed for a $17bn flared gas deal...

...Major western companies, such as Chevron and ConocoPhillips, that had hoped to sign contracts were unable to do so. A third round [of contracts] took place in December 2010 and saw no major western oil companies (except Shell) win contracts. I believe that there was an Iraqi backlash against the awarding of contracts to the large western major oil companies. Thus, in December 2010, fields went to Russian oil companies Lukoil and Gazprom, Norway's Statoil, and the Angolan company Sonangol, among others."...

...Those who claim that the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 to get control of the country's giant oil reserves will be left scratching their heads by the results of last weekend's auction of Iraqi oil contracts: Not a single U.S. company secured a deal in the auction of contracts that will shape the Iraqi oil industry for the next couple of decades. Two of the most lucrative of the multi-billion-dollar oil contracts went to two countries which bitterly opposed the U.S. invasion — Russia and China — while even Total Oil of France, which led the charge to deny international approval for the war at the U.N. Security Council in 2003, won a bigger stake than the Americans in the most recent auction. "[The distribution of oil contracts] certainly answers the theory that the war was for the benefit of big U.S. oil interests," says Alex Munton, Middle East oil analyst for the energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie, whose clients include major U.S. companies. "That has not been demonstrated by what has happened this week."...

[GRG55]

Re: Spain gets Mugged again!

Anybody that has spent any time in a developing country will understand the difficult dilemma those governments have regarding electricity.

More so than even petroleum, electricity is regarded as a necessity. No power, no ability to supply water to people or crops. No power, it immediately compromises the ability to educate kids (try doing your homework using a candle). No power, no ability to even charge your mobile phone. So many people in these countries cannot afford to pay for their electricity that the power company has trouble collecting, or there is rampant bypassing of the meters on houses and small businesses. Trying to put a stop to either of these is almost always a politically explosive action, and therefore it doesn't happen.

Private electricity providers in these circumstances almost always contract with the local or national government as the purchaser counterparty, thus leaving the problems of collecting from final users with those governments. Governments, wishing to limit their exposure to the defacto or sometimes genuine subsidies, want to limit the returns the private providers can earn. The whole situation is almost assured to result in an unsatisfactory outcome for everyone. I have been some places where bypassing the power meter is so common that it is not seen as illegal or wrong, and in fact people that don't do it are considered "stupid" by their neighbours.

A family friend, the former head of the Electricity Board of one of the most developed States in India, told me a story about the constant disputes between the State power company and the State government. According to the metered usage the power company had plenty of surplus generating capacity, and therefore could not get funds approved by the government to expand the supply. But the reality was that so much power was not being measured because of bypassing of meters that there were chronic shortages of electricity, and the politicians found it convenient to blame it on the power company instead of trying to fix the problem. Just imagine how much more fun that would have been if the power company was owned by foreigners :-)

I am not much for government owned companies, but I do wonder if electricity is determined to be a public good of necessity, perhaps there isn't really a better model than a publicly owned utility, especially if that utility has to be cross-subsidized from other parts of the economy to achieve policy objectives in terms of supply to poor and low-income households. In that instance the private sector is a supplier of equipment and services (Siemens, GE, etc) or a "banker" in the form of financing projects that use their equipment, often through development funding such as EBRD, World Bank, or their national export credit insurance programs, or via "BOT" projects.

Nationalizing the power company won't solve the electricity supply problems that Bolivia is probably facing, but at least it makes it clear who is responsible for dealing with them.

[mrbubbles]

Re: Spain gets Mugged again!

It always comes down to the Dollar :-)

But I really would appreciate if one of you bright lights can explain to us dimbulbs why almost all the oil contracts in Iraq are going to "non-American" oil companies like Royal-Dutch Shell, BP, the Russians, the Chinese, etc.??? It's not as though the USA doesn't have a massive military presence in the region...

You erroneously assume Americans automatically become the beneficiaries simply because they foot the military bill. The looting of that country is a combined effort of many parties. And those oil money are still traded in dollars, American oligarchies still get a cut, a large cut of the pie.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Spain gets Mugged again!

It always comes down to the Dollar :-)

But I really would appreciate if one of you bright lights can explain to us dimbulbs why almost all the oil contracts in Iraq are going to "non-American" oil companies like Royal-Dutch Shell, BP, the Russians, the Chinese, etc.??? It's not as though the USA doesn't have a massive military presence in the region...

My only suppositions are that either:

1: The Davos crowd has no national allegiance any more. The international "nobility" don't much care who exactly gets the cash as long as it's one of their own. After all, anyone willing to squirrel away all their cash in offshore tax havens certainly is no patriot. (The premise of globalization always seemed to me that the U.S. would accept responsibility for protecting the interests of any and all multi-national corporations).

2: The formerly Trotskyist Neocons actually thought they'd spread international capitalism and democracy with a sword and didn't care about cost recovery for the U.S. (Interestingly, it has occurred to me that now upon the era of the Arab Spring, an historian could easily write a book calling W., Rumsfeld, Cheney et. all geniuses for transforming the Middle East into a democratic region).

3: The only reason the whole war even took place was to get Halliburton immediate contracts and cash, and once the media pressure turned up, they opened everything up to competitive international bid. (This is a hyper-cynical view).

But between the fact that U.S. taxpayers are asked to pay for the war (with lives as well as money), the reconstruction, universal healthcare for every Iraqi, and get little to no oil contracts for U.S. corporations in return, one must wonder why the war took place.

If I had to guess, I'd say that #1 has the most weight in this scenario.

But I'm no expert here. I was involved in none of these decisions. And I'd be interested in others' ideas on the matter.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: Spain gets Mugged again!

....I am not much for government owned companies, but I do wonder if electricity is determined to be a public good of necessity, perhaps there isn't really a better model than a publicly owned utility....

Our great grandfathers were not stupid people.

They lived through the chaos as we developed and installed the elecrical grid, the telephone system and the pipeline delivery network for natural gas.
After experiencing the delights of fully private ownership of these, our great grandfathers decided that publicly regulated monopolies were the best answer.

They seemed to work pretty well for most of the last century as the US become the economic wonder of the world.

[aaron]

Re: Spain gets Mugged again!

Our great grandfathers were not stupid people.

They lived through the chaos as we developed and installed the elecrical grid, the telephone system and the pipeline delivery network for natural gas.
After experiencing the delights of fully private ownership of these, our great grandfathers decided that publicly regulated monopolies were the best answer.

They seemed to work pretty well for most of the last century as the US become the economic wonder of the world.

I agree.
Enron was a good example in recent times that proves the point. As they did their paper trading, California had power problems.

[lektrode]

Re: Spain gets Mugged again!

... And I'd be interested in others' ideas on the matter.

methinks yer #1 supposition was likely the best answer... but...

theres always the supposition that it was due to geedubya's stated reason that nearly every member of congress concurred with and voted for - and that the prev occupant's admin had also concluded: that ole wile e. saddamy did in fact constitute a real and present danger to not only the mideast (as evidenced by the fact that he gassed the kurds, invaded iran, invaded kuwait, amongst other friendly/neighborly actions that endeared him to his followers, like his buddy chemical al, his 2 cuddly kids, et al)

it might've otherwise gone better, had they paid attention to the .mil people rather than the civvy-neocons, and clearly rumsfeld&co f___d up.

but hey - what do i know...
maybe john "voted for it before against it" kerry can shed some addl light on the topic - am sure he's had plenty of thots while out cruising in his new boat....

just hope the 'bush lied and people died" crowd can wrap their heads around the current occupant's brilliant plan (that 4years out hasnt shown much progress, if any - in spite of his claiming credit for zappin osama)

[gnk]

Re: Spain gets Mugged again!

It always comes down to the Dollar :-)

But I really would appreciate if one of you bright lights can explain to us dimbulbs why almost all the oil contracts in Iraq are going to "non-American" oil companies like Royal-Dutch Shell, BP, the Russians, the Chinese, etc.??? It's not as though the USA doesn't have a massive military presence in the region...

My opinion, which is one I can not prove, is that it is more important to have your hand on the oil "spigot." Edit: Especially if a SHTF scenario materializes.

All those contracts are one half of a bunch of quid pro quos. What's the other half? Who knows... but there's always been a lot of horsetrading behind the scenes when it comes to geopolitics. Trying to understand geopolitics is like trying to describe an iceberg. But as you know, only 10% of an iceberg is visible.

Just my humble stab in the dark.... I am as perplexed as you.

[DToM67]

Re: Spain gets Mugged again!

It always comes down to the Dollar :-)

But I really would appreciate if one of you bright lights can explain to us dimbulbs why almost all the oil contracts in Iraq are going to "non-American" oil companies like Royal-Dutch Shell, BP, the Russians, the Chinese, etc.??? It's not as though the USA doesn't have a massive military presence in the region...

I thought this situation in Iraq was well known, especially by the always informed iTulip crowd.

Here:

Fascists are smarter than Socialists in that regard. They know it's better to control industry than to own it.