Then blamed an entity which had absolutely nothing to do with it, sent over a million Americans and NATO men and women to risk their lives for unprecedented oil profits and no-bid reconstruction contracts, indebted and enslaved not only Iraq, but America as well, and the puppeteers and profiteers are laughing all the way to the banks they own and control. Had enough yet? World Bank Whistleblower Karen Hudes in her November 2013 public warning: “If you look at Goldman Sachs, CitiGroup, Bank of America, or Wells Fargo, these are all one entity because their boards are all interlocking. This group is in control of the Federal Reserve system, AND of the central banks of the 58 countries that belong to Bank for International Settlements. These [central banks] are not government entities, they are private entities. This group thinks it sits above the law. What I found out actually is that there are layers upon layers and that there are secret groups that go around acting like the enforcers or the coordinators or whatever you want to call them. So I can tell you who these groups are so you can get a good picture of how this group operates. There’s something called the Knights of Malta, there’s something called the Council of Foreign Relations, there’s something called the Bilderberg Group, there’s something called the Trilateral Commission, and fasten your seatbelts, folks… there’s something called the Jesuits. These people are the ones that are determining and have mapped this out.” Former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan in his 2007 book The Age of Turbulence wrote: “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” In a talk at Stanford on Oct. 13, 2007, former CENTCOM commander Gen. John Abizaid seconded Greenspan. “Of course it [Iraq] is all about oil,” Abizaid said. “Its insulting to the thousands of Americans, and the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, whove died in the Iraq War to even try and pretend the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation was not, in part, if not wholly, to do with securing future oil supplies for the United States and its allies, in particular, the UK, Australia and Israel. stated Darryl Mason. It just goes to show that it is all about oil, for the United States and its ally.” said former Middle East Ambassador James Akins. In Haigs presence, (Henry) Kissinger referred pointedly to military men as dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy. -- Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein, The Final Days, p. 208. Henry Kissinger is the head of Kissinger Associates, which provides consultancy for oil and arms deals all over the globe, and which counts among its clients the U.S. government, NATO, many corporations, and foreign countries. He also sits on the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, and the Bilderberg Group all named by World Bank Whistleblower Karen Hudes in her November 2013 public warning. America’s 10 most profitable corporations paid an average corporate income tax rate of just 9 percent in 2011, according to a study from financial site NerdWallet reported by the Huffington Post. The 10 companies include Wall Street banks like Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase, oil companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron, and tech companies like Apple, IBM, and Microsoft. The two companies with the lowest tax rates were both oil companies. ExxonMobil paid just 2% in taxes while Chevron’s tax rate was just 4 percent according to the published report. •The five biggest oil companies earned a combined profit of $375 million per day, or a record $137 billion profit for the year, in 2011, despite reducing their oil production. •In 60 seconds, these five companies earned $261,000 — more than 96 percent of American households make in one year. •These five oil companies received $6.6 million in federal tax breaks every day. spent $100 million of their profits each day, or over 50 percent, buying back their own stock to enrich their board, senior managers, and largest share holders. •The entire oil and gas industry spent on average $400,000 each day lobbying senators and representatives. In March 2012 a bill was presented to the U.S. Congress to stop the taxpayer subsidies to the oil companies earning historic profits, Democrats who joined the Republicans in defeating the bill include Sens. Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Ben Nelson (D-NE), Mark Begich (D-AK), and Jim Webb (D-VA). Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) and retiring Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) broke ranks and voted to cut the tax breaks. Two senators, Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) didn’t vote. And nothing changed but the passage of time. Exactly as so many of us have discovered in the family court corruption and interagency atrocities now exposed. So long as we will all accept being lied to, our children and homes stolen, military men and women sacrificed all over the globe for corporate profits, and all reduced to expendable, replaceable lives and mere dollar signs, absolutely nothing is going to change but the faces and names of the victims. The 2013 profit totals are in for the big five oil companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil, and Shell. Their financial reports indicate that they earned a combined total of $93 billion last year, or $177,000 per minute. Exxon Mobil, Shell, and Chevron still had the first, seventh, and eighth, respectively, highest profits of any global public company on the 2013 Fortune 500 list. The largest of these special provisions allows these companies to qualify for the “limitation on section 199 deduction attributable to oil, natural gas, or primary products,” which will cost taxpayers $14.4 billion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation. The Joint Committee on Taxation found that the second-largest deduction was for “modifications of foreign tax credit rules applicable to major integrated oil companies which are dual capacity taxpayers.” This provision is worth $7.5 billion over 10 years. Seth Hanlon, former Director of Fiscal Reform at the Center for American Progress states “… oil companies have been permitted to claim credits for certain payments to foreign governments, even in countries that generally impose low or no business tax (suggesting that these payments, or levies, are in fact a form of royalty). Dual capacity taxpayer rules, therefore, are a subsidy for foreign production by U.S. oil companies.” the American Petroleum Institute, Exxon Mobil, and other oil companies are lobbying to lift the crude oil export ban, which would enable them to sell their domestic oil at the world, or Brent, price that fetched nearly $10 per barrel more than the domestic, or West Texas Intermediate, price on February 7. Lifting the ban would force the United States to import more expensive foreign oil to replace the exported domestic oil, which could raise gasoline prices. Banking giant Barclays Plc predicts that lifting the current ban could add $10 billion annually to gasoline prices paid at the pump. Of course, when it comes to spending their money, the priorities of oil companies are fairly obvious. All of the companies, except for ConocoPhillips, spent a combined total of $32 billion, or nearly 40 percent of their total profits, to repurchase their own stock. The CEOs of these five companies had a combined compensation of $96 million in 2012, the last year for which data are available, or nearly $20 million per CEO. This is nearly 400 times greater than the $51,107 median income for a family of four during that same year. These five major oil corporations also spent $45 million on lobbying in 2013; every $1 spent on lobbying helped the companies protect $53 of their tax breaks—an outstanding rate of return. Venezuela’s oil export accounts for up to 97 percent of export earnings of the country’s budget. The export earnings of Venezuela’s budget have dropped by 30 percent in October, according to Bloomberg. The oil production by Venezuela within OPEC stood at 2.4 million barrels per day in Third Quarter of 2014, according to the US JP Morgan bank. Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates totaled 2.8 million barrels per day during the same reporting period. Saudi Arabia ranks 1st with 9.8 million barrels of oil per day and is followed by Iraq now being plundered by U.S. and UK oil companies for 3.1 million barrels per day. JP Morgan estimated that actual OPEC production in the third quarter of 2014 was 36.5 million barrels per day.
Posted on: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 20:57:53 +0000
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