Dianavan, I would suggest you go to Google type in "Oil Who Gets What?" It's an OPEC site it tells you the FOB price of oil in a whole rake of countries, then gives the Company mark up and most important of all the tax taken by each country (55% for the UK per barrel - not bad when you consider that they have not spent, or risked, a penny to accrue that major slice of the pie).

"Some would refer to these oil barons as neo-cons." - In no way, shape, or form dianavan. Purely by it's nature and the places that they do business the international oil business and companies involved in it have to be extremely flexible and pragmatic enterprises, if they weren't they wouldn't survive.

"We think the proposed oil law doesn't serve the interests of the Iraqi people at all," said Faleh Abood Umara, general secretary of the Southern Oil Company Union and the Iraqi Federation of Oil Workers' Unions, at a news conference in New York on June 18. "It emphasizes or confirms American hegemony over Iraqi oil fields."

Well dianavan everybody knows what thought did. I would like to ask this buffoon exactly how, "It emphasizes or confirms American hegemony over Iraqi oil fields." when there is not one single Iraqi oil field in existence, or in prospect, being developed or operated by an American oil company. The man is talking out of his arse, like most Union officials when addressing the media, normally a load of ill-informed, misleading, populist crap designed to inflame the situation.