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Political rant // why I hate mainstream news.

Surprise, surprise, the oil fields in Iraq are up for sale. Mostly to US corporations (you know like Exxon Mobil) and of course BP (oh right, they're totally focusing on alternative energy... oh right with gas prices skyrocketing, everyone's too busy freaking out to worry about the environment- and Bush has placed a moratorium on the solar energy project).

The picture that Yahoo! paints of this is fucking ridiculous. Completely utterly spitworthy.

Let's start with the beginning:
"Iraq opened international bidding for eight enormous oil and gas fields Monday, paving the way for investment in a nation with some of the world's largest petroleum reserves."
Iraq does not exist. What the fuck is Iraq? A puppet government set up by the US government. So let's not mince words here,  "the US opened international bidding..."

"biggest foreign stake in Iraq"
Reason the war has continued. 'Iraq' is in crumbles because it was purposefully partitioned for conflict to occur so it could not become a regional power.

"But the contracts won't be signed for a year, and if Western firms win a dominant role it could feed perceptions that U.S.-led forces toppled Saddam Hussein to get at Iraq's natural resources."
You think!

"Politics does not come into this," al-Dabbagh said. "There is no preferential treatment for anyone, no matter who."
How fucking naive are you?

"And the Iraqi government could use the revenue to rebuild infrastructure and deliver services."
Last time I checked the war isn't over. There's still some angry people - like the Shiites and the Kurds.

"Several Democratic senators in the U.S. recently asked the Bush administration to block the Iraqi government's reported no-bid deals with Western firms until the country finalized the oil law, but the White House refused."
This is just a damn on the US government. They don't want to wait until the oil law is finalized.

"We have been providing services to Iraq from outside the country for a number of years," said Robert Wine, a spokesman for BP. "We submitted a study of the Rumeila fields several years ago and if the discussions do lead to deal, they will focus on the technical services in that report. We need to clarify — this is not about access to the country's oil resources, or exploration. It's a management contract, to provide technical resources."
haha to provide technical resources. nice.

But this is all at the end of the article... it's the hegemonic framework of news stories: potentially scandalous information goes at the end.

On Monday, the Times reported that a small U.S. State Department team helped draw up contracts between the Iraqi Oil Ministry and the five major oil companies reportedly getting no-bid contracts.

State Department spokesman Tom Casey confirmed a small number of U.S. advisers were providing "technical support" to the Iraqi Oil Ministry. But he said "they are not there to try and give the Iraqis any kind of specific requests or to make decisions or to even push in an individual direction."

Casey said the decision by the Iraqis not to announce contracts for several Western firms Monday was their own and not influenced by Washington.

Anyway I have a shitload of reading to do, but I just thought this was ... sorta ridiculous.