This made my blood boil!

[abu nuwas]

except"we"will have the oil now

What do you mean? Western companies, including BP and Total, already had excellent contracts with Ghaddafi. The Libyan oil reserves are the sovereign property of Libya. It still needs to sell oil. What has changed?

From a consumer's point of view, it would be interesting to see an investigation in depth of the numerous causes of price rises, due to any number of bizarre causes, including wars and threats of interrupted supply, either because of threatened war, as now with Iran, or Russia ceasing gas supply (which impacts the oil-price and is directly linked). A few years ago, it was said that S Arabia just did not have the port facilities to enable a hoped for increase in supply, and up the price went. Yet shortly afterwards, it was able to do just that.

Then there is speculation, which takes a little oil off the market. I see this sometimes, in the form of tankers off the coast of East Anglia. They do not move. But plainly, they also reduce the number of tankers available. Some of that oil, when I last took an interest, is owned by JP Morgan. That is fair: it no doubt helps the market function. I hate conspiracy theories intensely, but if it were ever demonstrated that international events had been invented to engineer price-hikes, it would be a nail in the coffin of capitalism. But what did you mean?

[srijantje]

i mean 'we' have a potentional troublesome 'regime' out of the way,like iraq,the taxpayer pays for the war,private companies 'clean up' afterwards

[billy]

the oil prices are definitely being manipulated by sovereign states, even the uk. we have brent oil and every time the barrel price rises we generate more cash for the uk and uk companies.let's say the isa put an imbargo on oil entering their country and europe (not including russia) did the same, along with china. the price would flop lower than whale shit and it would be the oil producers who'd be shitting their pants, that said it really is the opecs who have us over the barrel and the rest of the world would never work together at setting the prices. it would be good though if we had the balls to say "from now on we only buy oil at $45 a barrel. now i'm going off topic and have no idea how to connect this post with forced mutilation. (hey, i just did) i think the only realistic way to help stop it is through western propoganda the nice propaganda that educates via the web.