Libby… a… er, Libya, anyway… as noted by our brief visit to our Beijing comrades at People’s Daily, who give us this quick update that Occidental Petroleum is the first major U.S. oil company to dip its toe back in Libya, as part of a relatively major U.S. incursion to seek out combustible black gunk from… Africa.
Certainly, OPEC members Libya and Nigeria were (and are) major players in the oil game, but growing, growing are places like Angola and obscure islands Sao Tome and Principe and all sorts of other venues all over Africa. One would have thought it would have been love and kisses from American producers a while ago (Colonel Moammar, after all, handed old Dubya a nice propaganda coup by unilaterally disassembling… or was it dissembling… his weapons of mass destruction program).
Of course,screwing around North Africa in search of oil goes back at least as far as Rommell, if not Lawrence of Arabia. Nothing really new here. Of course, I didn’t come across this story in any Western press… the Chinese are sensitive to oil related stories, what with our foolishly racist, xenophobic and self-defeating opposition to a Chinese concern’s acquisition of Unocal from which China is still reeling (and IMHO, helped speed China’s decision to start free-floating its currency, realizing that it had better actually stabilize things, because, to quote John, Paul, George and Ringo: “you only give me your funny paper,” meaning the Chinese selling us artificially cheap stuff because of a pegged currency was rapidly ceasing to be in China’s own interests… if still in Walmart’s…)
Anyway, OcciPet returns to the shores of Tripoli… Armand would be so proud. Once again, why we span the metropole to bring you news from beyond just Oceania… we’ll leave you with this discussion of Russian-Chinese joint naval exercises in the Pacific… I don’t believe the two nations conducted exercises of this nature, even when both were firmly communist…
Again, things not ordinarily covered in our “globally challenged” solipsistic American press that you just might want to know about… speaking of which, R.I.P. Peter Jennings, who passed away at 67… whether “9-11 changed everything” or not, note that all of the traditional big 3 major networks have turned over their anchors since then… for whatever reason, it was Jennings’ coverage I mostly watched on 9-11 itself (after returning home from across the street from… the WTC)… just the things one remembers… well, R.I.P., Peter Jennings…
tdog
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