Invasion of Libya by US & UK ?

[ChineseTiger1986]

Why should the oil fatcats lower prices in response to inelastic demand?

After looting the Libyan oil, they can keep hiking the oil price.

 

[gambit]

There is no free meal in this World.

Answer the question. You said that Iraq was 'for oil' and now you are saying the same for Libya. If 'for oil' is true, then even before the oil hit the market, we should see refined petroleum, as in gasoline, prices declining in anticipation of increased crude oil supply. That is not happening. Crude barrels are over $100 per. The other OPEC members said they can increase production to offset the higher per barrel price. Failure to answer the question make you look like an idiot. As if we need further reinforcement of that...

 

[ChineseTiger1986]

Answer the question. You said that Iraq was 'for oil' and now you are saying the same for Libya. If 'for oil' is true, then even before the oil hit the market, we should see refined petroleum, as in gasoline, prices declining in anticipation of increased crude oil supply. That is not happening. Crude barrels are over $100 per. The other OPEC members said they can increase production to offset the higher per barrel price. Failure to answer the question make you look like an idiot. As if we need further reinforcement of that...

High production + high price, these oil fatcats are going to against the basic fundamental concept of the economy. Simply because they are too greedy. Guess who has spilled more than 200 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico?

Who has caused the financial crisis in 2008? Don't tell that you will blame every of these issues on China.

 

[gubbi]

Why should the oil fatcats lower prices in response to inelastic demand?

After looting the Libyan oil, they can keep hiking the oil price.

Do you even know what you are saying? Do you understand how OPEC works?
Do you guys understand the basic demand supply pricing criteria of a market? We arent talking about community co-op markets here, btw.

Both your statements make no sense whatsoever. They come out mainly as anti-US/West vitriol, nothing more.

 

[gubbi]

High production + high price, these oil fatcats are going to against the basic fundamental concept of the economy. Simply because they are too greedy. Guess who has spilled more than 200 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico?

Oil wasnt 'spilled'. It leaked out of a pipe at the bottom of the gulf.

Who has caused the financial crisis in 2008? Don't tell that you will blame every of these issues on China.

Financial crisis of 2008 had nothing to do with oil. Did you read the newspapers?

 

[Rig Vedic]

Yes, yes. The same "LION" who accepted that Lockerbie bombing was a Libyan act and paid billions as compensation. The same "LION" who had a covert nuclear weapons program but then after the fate of Osirik reactor and North Korea and Saddam Hussein declared his intention of stopping his nuclear weapons program for removal of sanctions and coddled up to western countries.

Yes, Ghaddafi isnt a lamb!

FYI, Libya is part of OPEC, so is 'de facto' gas station for the world. What makes it a lucrative target for invasion as opposed to Bahrain or UAE or even Qatar? Iraqi oil isnt paying for US/NATO wars. So how would Libyan oil pay for it?

Western oil companies have huge investments in Libya, and Gaddhafi was threatening to throw them out.

 

[Hussein]

Western oil companies have huge investments in Libya, and Gaddhafi was threatening to throw them out.

NO he was threatening AFTER Westerns (but not only: Turkey, Qatar, Arab League) decided for operations
So pls stop manipulations here . Thank you.

 

[gambit]

Do you even know what you are saying? Do you understand how OPEC works?
Do you guys understand the basic demand supply pricing criteria of a market? We arent talking about community co-op markets here, btw.

Both your statements make no sense whatsoever. They come out mainly as anti-US/West vitriol, nothing more.

Neither of them know what the hell they are saying, let alone what the hell they are talking about.

As far as the 'inelastic demand' bit goes, a product become 'inelastic' at different levels. At the highest level, food is an 'inelastic' product because we need to eat to survive. Essentially, there are no alternatives to food. But there are alternatives to oil as a source of energy. Those sources are nuclear, coal, wind, etc...etc...However, because these alternates all have their drawbacks, oil become an 'inelastic' product by virtue of those drawbacks, as in demand, because currently we are best at using oil for energy. Could we become better at using nuclear? Yes, but until that day happens, oil remain relatively 'inelastic'. Could we survive ala 'breatharians' scammers where we only need air to survive, meaning air is a viable alternative to meat and vegetables? No, so it is inevitable that food will remain an 'inelastic' product/demand forever.

OPEC is an immoral cartel. It is not an illegal cartel because there is no international law available, accompanied by appropriate enforcement mechanism, to dissolve this cartel. Inside a country's borders, we can have both, law and enforcement mechanism, to dissolve cartels we deemed harmful. OPEC exploits the fact that oil is such an 'inelastic' product/demand to enrich themselves but the members contribute nothing of worth to humanity from the wealth.

 

[gambit]

Why should the oil fatcats lower prices in response to inelastic demand?

Then we can blame CNOOC, a state owned oil 'fatcat', for China's diesel shortage?

 

[Rig Vedic]

NO he was threatening AFTER Westerns (but not only: Turkey, Qatar, Arab League) decided for operations
So pls stop manipulations here . Thank you.

Here is an article from about 2 years ago:
-----------------------------------------

Energy Strongmen
Is Libya Going To Boot U.S. Oil Companies? - Forbes.com

Christopher Helman 01.22.09, 10:09 AM ET

HOUSTON -- On Wednesday Libya's President Muammar Gaddafi made a bad week for ConocoPhillips even worse. Talking with Georgetown University students via satellite, he said, according to Reuters, that oil prices ($43/barrel Wednesday) were "unbearable" and that Libyan oil "maybe should be owned by national companies or the public sector at this point, in order to control the oil prices, the oil production or maybe to stop it."

"We may refuse to sell it at this very low price," he added.

ConocoPhillips operates the Waha concession, Libya's biggest collection of fields, producing some 300,000 barrels of oil per day. It's unknown how much Waha production was affected by Gaddafi's order last month to reduce Libyan oil production by 270,000 bpd to 1.4 million bpd.

Last Friday the company pre-announced write-downs of $34 billion, 1,400 layoffs and a sad sack 30% reserve replacement rate for 2008. No better time to bury bad news than the Friday before the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday and Barack Obama's inauguration. By the time ConocoPhillips officially releases fourth-quarter results Jan. 28, investors might be less fixated on the mistakes of the past and more worried about the risks of the future in Libya.

Is Libya about to take the lead of its friends in Venezuela and Russia and launch a new round of energy-sector nationalism? The thought sends a shiver through the collective spines of ConocoPhillips, Marathon Oil, Occidental Petroleum, Amerada Hess and Royal Dutch Shell. All have made massive new investments in Libya since Gaddafi renounced his nuclear weapons program, made reparations for past terrorist activities like the Lockerbie jetliner bombing and returned to the fold of seemingly responsible nations.

Libyan newspapers have been actively discussing nationalization in recent weeks as a response to crude prices plunging 75% from last year's highs. "We are facing a difficult situation. We hope that the prices will go up again, say $100 a barrel, so that this idea would be discarded, to stop this idea of calling for nationalization," Ghaddafi said Wednesday.

Conoco was an original member, with Marathon and Hess, of the so-called Oasis group that discovered some of Libya's most prolific oil fields back in the 1960s and operated there until the enactment of U.S. sanctions in 1986. In 2005 the trio agreed to pay Libya $1.8 billion to get back in to the Waha concession, comprised of a $1.3 billion fee and $500 million for improvements Libya's national oil company had made in their absence. They got a 25-year lease and 40% collective stake in fields that produce on the order of 250,000 barrels a day, with ample opportunities for further development.

For its share, some 48,000 bpd (2% of the company's total daily output), ConocoPhillips forked over more than $700 million. It expects to amortize that investment over decades. But if Gaddafi takes his cues from buddies Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chavez and moves to dilute western oil companies' stakes, ConocoPhillips might soon have to add Libya to its list of write-downs (which included the $7.2 billion impairment in value of its 20% stake in Russia's Lukoil and $25.4 billion of goodwill, most tied to the 2006 acquisition of Burlington Resources).

The three strongmen are proven comrades. Gaddafi has hosted Venezuelan President Chavez in Libya at least four times in recent years and in 2004 bestowed on Chavez his human rights award for "fighting imperialism," (i.e., George W. Bush and ExxonMobil, among others). Putin, last April, made a state visit to Tripoli accompanied by Gazprom execs and a group from Italian energy company ENI. Putin forgave Gaddafi several billion dollars in Soviet era debt in exchange for Gaddafi agreeing to buy many more billions of weapons from Russia. Gazprom soon swapped ENI's stake in Libya's 100,000 bpd Elephant field for some arctic assets.

In October Russian warships stopped in Tripoli on their way to Venezuela. In November, Gaddafi made his first visit to Moscow since the Soviet era. Discussions with Putin and President Dimitri Medvedev reportedly involved visions of a gas cartel that would include Russia, Libya, Iran, Algeria and some Central Asian nations.

Gazprom is most interested in getting control of ENI's Greenstream natural gas pipeline, which runs 370 miles across the Mediterranean from Libya to Sicily, delivering as much as 1 billion cubic feet of gas a day. Just one more energy lever a Moscow-led gas cartel could use against Europe.

There's little reason to believe that Gaddafi wouldn't selectively target U.S. oil company assets for partial nationalization. Though U.S. oil companies lobbied Congress to have Libya excluded from a U.S. terrorism compensation law, Libya ended up shelling out $1.5 billion last October to settle all claims by U.S. citizens for damages caused by past state terrorism.

It's enchanting, almost, that Gaddafi hasn't softened with age, that his revolutionary zeal is alive and well. During the Q&A with Georgetown students yesterday, he showed the yawning gap between U.S. and Libyan foreign policy: "Terrorism is a dwarf, not a giant. I think Osama bin Laden should be given a chance to reform and redirect his followers if he wants a dialogue." U.S. oil companies should brace themselves to leave Libya yet again.

 

[Rig Vedic]

Reason for war? Gaddafi wanted to nationalise oil - English pravda.ru

Reason for war? Gaddafi wanted to nationalise oil

25.03.2011 15:46

The Libyan leader proposed the nationalisation of U.S. oil companies, as well as those of UK, Germany, Spain, Norway, Canada and Italy in 2009.

On January 25, 2009, Muammar Al Gaddafi announced that his country was studying the nationalisation of foreign companies due to lower oil prices.

"The oil-exporting countries should opt for nationalisation because of the rapid fall in oil prices. We must put the issue on the table and discuss it seriously," said Gaddafi.

"Oil should be owned by the State at this time, so we could better control prices by the increase or decrease in production," said the Libyan leader.

These statements have worried the main foreign companies operating in Libya: Anglo-Dutch Shell, British Petroleum, U.S. ExxonMobil, Hess Corp., Marathon Oil, Occidental Petroleum and ConocoPhillips, the Spanish Repsol, Germany's Wintershall, Austria's OMV , Norway's Statoil, Eni and Canada's Petro Canada.

In 2008, the Libyan state oil company, National Oil, prepared a report on the subject in which officials suggested modifying the production-sharing agreements with foreign companies in order to increase state revenues.

As a result of these contract changes, Libya gained 5.4 billion dollars in oil revenues.

On February 16, 2009, Gaddafi took a step further and called on Libyans to back his proposal to dismantle the government and to distribute the oil wealth directly to the 5 million inhabitants of the country.

However, his plan to deliver oil revenues directly to the Libyan people met opposition by senior officials who could lose their jobs due to a parallel plan by Gaddafi to rid the state of corruption.

Some officials, including Prime Minister Al-Baghdadi, Ali Al-Mahmoudi and Farhat Omar Bin Guida, of the Central Bank, told Gaddafi that the measure could harm the country's economy in the long term due to "capital flight."

"Do not be afraid to directly redistribute the oil money and create fairer governance structures that respond to people's interests," Gaddafi said in a Popular Committee.

The Popular Committees are the backbone of Libya. Through them citizens are represented at the district level.

"The Administration has failed and the state's economy has failed. Enough is enough. The solution is for the Libyan people to directly receive oil revenues and decide what to do with them," Gaddafi said in a speech broadcast on state television. To this end, the Libyan leader urged a radical reform of government bureaucracy.

Despite this, senior Libyan government officials voted to delay Gaddafi's plans. Only 64 ministers from a total of 468 Popular Committee members voted for the measure. There were 251 who saw the measures as positive, but chose to delay their implementation.

Given the rejection of the Committee, Gaddafi affirmed before a public meeting: "My dream during all these years was to give the power and wealth directly to the people."

So...another big LIE falls by the wayside, the false image of Ghaddafi the dictator who robs from his people.

So far we have had pictures of pro-Ghaddafi demonstrations being portrayed as being against him. The professional, foreign and Photoshop nature of anti-Ghaddafi posters being bandied about were noted, along with signs being held upside down by people not knowing the alphabet placed on the signs.

We have had pictures of one sided battles where heavily armed terrorists are "fighting" with nobody. We have had reports, glaringly false, that Ghaddafi was fleeing the country.

We have had more than enough reports of bombings against his own people that never happened, as well as attacks against "unarmed civilians" that proved to be incorrect. It is patently obvious that there are no "unarmed civilians" involved in these actions against Ghaddafi, but CIA and other intelligence service mercenaries, foreign elements and Al Qaeda.

It has been brought to light that the living standard in Libya is the highest in Africa and that Libya was to be commended for its human rights record.

How many lies do we have to catch them in before somebody in charge buys a clue? It's no sale!

They try to portray Ghaddafi as crazy when he speaks of fighting Al Qaeda and now they have to admit it's true.

Two documents strongly back Gaddafi on this issue, according to the findings of Alexander Cockburn.

"The first is a secret cable to the State Department from the US embassy in Tripoli in 2008, part of the WikiLeaks trove, entitled, "Extremism in Eastern Libya," which revealed that this area is rife with anti-American, pro-jihad sentiment.

The second document, or rather set of documents, are the so-called Sinjar Records, captured al-Qaeda documents that fell into American hands in 2007. They were duly analysed by the Combating Terrorism Center at the US Military Academy at West Point. Al-Qaeda is a bureaucratic outfit and the records contain precise details on personnel, including those who came to Iraq to fight American and coalition forces and, when necessary, commit suicide.

The West Point analysts' statistical study of the al-Qaeda personnel records concludes that one country provided "far more" foreign fighters in per capita terms than any other: namely, Libya."

So who is the crazy one? Obviously that gang of lunatics savagely launching attacks on Libya based on the worst collection of lies in the history of the world. If you want to know where they are headed, just look at their track record, littered with genocide, theft and destruction.

More and more evidence is surfacing that this entire operation has been planned from outside (read U.S. and EU) for quite some time. First surround (Egypt and Tunisia), then invade. Wesley Clarke revealed the laundry list which included Libya.

In the U.S., there is a particulary motley group of interventionist war mongers who don't know what they're doing: Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power, obviously sexually frustrated and repressed man hating lesbians who want to prove they are he-men.

We are also seeing attacks on residential areas, many civilians being killed. There have been attacks on Ghaddafi's living area, a clear attempt at assassination. Today intelligence also reports they plan a ground invasion. The fascists of the west never change. The term "humanitarian bombing" reminds of George Orwell doublespeak.

One can only heartily agree on Gaddafi's statement: They are "a group of crazy fascists that will end in the garbage dump of history."

History will surely judge them on the same page as Adolph Hitler.

 

[Thomas]

Easily pumping out the oil, then they would have exposed themselves of invading Iraq under their fake democracy, but it was for oil in reality.

lol, you guys really need to come up with a better mantra then the war for oil. The only one I see resource benefiting in regards to Iraq, or Afghanistan is China.

 

[Respect4Respect01]

No invasion will occur but Colonel Gaddafi will have to go

Two protests in Tunisia and Egypt has already been successfuly... third will also follow the same suit or the protest will continue until Gaddafi's death / resignation

UK & USA may infiltrate and support the protesters but they won't directly go for another war against Libya. They are already more than busy in Afghanistan and Iraq

people like gaddafi dont die so fast lol

 

[Thoma Yosip]

people like gaddafi dont die so fast lol

True. Cockroaches can live for days with no head before they eventually starve to death.

President of the United States Barack Hussein Obams was on television this evening. He explained that the United States and its allies started attacking Libyan forces only after UN resolution 1973 was passed and only when KaDaffy was telling his own people that he was going to punish them. He called his own people rats and turned his military loose on them like ravening dogs. Civilians were being bombed and strafed by the Libyan Air Force. Libyan Army tanks were shooting up civilian neighborhoods while their artillery was bombarding cities and towns.

The United States really is not interested in invading Libya.

 

[nightcrawler]

I've consistently seen on this forum, and many others, that there is a common notion of "invade and steal the oil." I've responded countless times that this notion is ridiculous, and that anyone who passed 3rd grade math will see that it doesn't add up.

The current cost to operate a military on such a scale as invasion/occupation is astronomical, and it is impossible to justify it based on the "theft" of natural resources.

An analogy - a local store has some really cool video games I want, but I don't want to pay for them.

I buy a rifle, night vision goggles, explosives, advanced comm gear, and go to a military-style training center where I pay $10,000 for advanced training. I rent a HUMVEE, hire drivers and guards. One dark and cloudy night, I infiltrate the video game store, blow the doors off with explosives, storm in, and stuff 5 video games into my trousers. We escape. Success! I get to play "Call of Duty XII" for free!

you already gave the answer sir...exhibition of your warfare & defence industry in practical battle field so west can profoundly use the most common word...COMBAT-PROVEN technology