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I really don't want to blog about war anymore, but it just keeps getting worse and worse...as my 23rd birthday lunch on the Australia's soil is being heated up, it looks as if the oil game might be coming to its end for Americans in Iraq. The top emailed article at the amazing Sydney Morning Herald is today by Margo Kingston who undresses the deeper motives before the Antipodean, and even global eyes,: Oils ain't just oils, they're to die for

Tracking Policies & Investigative Stories: The Politics of Petroleum
Ken Silverstein of the Los Angeles Times has a series on oil companies’ efforts in Kazakhstan and Angola, based on internal company documents and other records. In the first piece, Silverstein writes that a group of influential Americans, including a former Secretary of State and the former executive director of the Democratic National Committee, pressed for U.S. support of the authoritarian Kazakh government. The paper found dozens of former government officials “who have worked for the oil industry or for foreign governments with extensive energy reserves - and, almost invariably, poor human rights records.” The second story, on Angola, details how oil firms “have won favor with the Dos Santos regime by steering contracts to Angolan insiders and by giving millions of dollars to foundations controlled by the ruling family.”
· Other stories are forthcoming [link first seen at Scoop ]
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