Important: Chevron/Texaco buying Unocal

This might be the biggest news story this month.

Unocal is the exploiter of the Kaspian pipeline. Some people (including John Pilger http://www.johnpilger.com) believe that their inability to operate the line in feudal Afghanistan was the real reason behind our war with Bedrock uhh.. Kabul.

The Bush family has strong ties with Unocal (and I bet they are no strange to Texaco). Chevron (former Standard Oil, Prescott Bush's old employer) AKA Exxon, is possibily best known for naming one of their oil tankers the "Condoleezza Rice".

This corporate take-over will have great impact. I hate to say it but am doing it anyway: Mark my words.

It is http://www.john-pilger.com but the article I was referring to is here http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/page.cfm?objectid=11392430&method=full

<snip>
The hypocrisy does not stop there. When the Taliban took Kabul in 1996, Washington said nothing. Why? Because Taliban leaders were soon on their way to Houston, Texas, to be entertained by executives of the oil company, Unocal.

With secret US government approval, the company offered them a generous cut of the profits of the oil and gas pumped through a pipeline that the Americans wanted to build from Soviet central Asia through Afghanistan.

A US diplomat said: "The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did." He explained that Afghanistan would become an American oil colony, there would be huge profits for the West, no democracy and the legal persecution of women. "We can live with that," he said.

Although the deal fell through, it remains an urgent priority of the administration of George W. Bush, which is steeped in the oil industry. Bush's concealed agenda is to exploit the oil and gas reserves in the Caspian basin, the greatest source of untapped fossil fuel on earth and enough, according to one estimate, to meet America's voracious energy needs for a generation. Only if the pipeline runs through Afghanistan can the Americans hope to control it.
</snip>

... the histories of the companies are not quite what you describe. Both Exxon and Chevron ultimately go back to Rockefeller's Standard Oil, but the 1911 anti-trust suit which broke up Standard Oil created thirty-four different entities, one of which was Jersey Standard, which eventually became Exxon, and another, Standard Oil of California, eventually became Chevron. They have been separate companies under separate control since 1911, therefore, so it's a bit confusing to say "Chevron AKA Exxon."

Since Prescott Bush was working his trading with the enemy magic through Union Bank shortly before and during WWII, it's probably inappropriate to say simply that his boss was Standard Oil. Actually, the company implicated in the Trading With The Enemy Act violations was Standard Oil of New Jersey (Jersey Standard) and its subsidiary, the Ethyl Corporation.

I suspect that, because of the elder Bush's interests in Zapata, he's probably close to most of the people in the oil bidness, as they say in Texas, but probably more particularly with the Houston- and Dallas-based firms, of which UNOCAL is not one. Both Chevron and UNOCAL are originally (and still are) California companies.

The closest visible link between the current Bush and UNOCAL is Zalmay Khalilzad, and that link is a tenuous one. He actually worked for a firm which consulted to UNOCAL, rather than working for them directly, and then, not for very long. Khalilzad was far more involved in central Asian affairs at the State Dept. during the Reagan years, long before he ever did any consulting related to UNOCAL.

Hamid Karzai was a UNOCAL employee at one time, and that made him pliable and suitable for the administration's purposes, because he was reliably pro-US, but even that might not be directly related to petroleum company interests. In fact, Bush's hosting of the Taliban, when governor of Texas, may have had more to do with screwing an Argentinian company, Bridas, which had won a contract with the Afghani government in 1996 to build that very same pipeline in question, rather than due to some extraordinary closeness of the Bushes to UNOCAL:

http://www.worldpress.org/specials/pp/pipeline_timeline.htm

Not saying that the Bushes don't look out for everybody in the oil business; it's just that there's no evidence I can find that they have extraordinary ties to UNOCAL beyond those with firms to which they would have been closer to, geographically, socially and economically, in Texas.

All that said, is this merger problematic? Yes, in the same way that any other merger with very large equals in the business leads to more layoffs and more anti-competitive behavior. The oil companies have consolidated much more power since the trust breakups of a century ago, and have acquired a lot more political power as a result. But, is this by design because of a closeness of the Bushes to UNOCAL? Not likely.

Cheers.

The following is from the May 5, 2001 San Francisco Chronicle:

"Leaving a wave of controversy in its wake, one of the most visible reminders of the Bush administration's ties to big oil - the 129,000-ton Chevron tanker Condoleezza Rice - has quietly been renamed, Chevron officials acknowledged yesterday.

The unannounced decision to rechristen the tanker was made by Chevron officials in late April, after "we had been in discussions with (Rice's) office," said Gorell. Asked if Rice or the White House had specifically requested the name change, Gorell said, "that's not for me to discuss."

The giant vessel was ... christened several years ago in honor of Rice, a longtime Chevron board member. Rice... served on Chevron's board from 1991 until Jan. 15, when she resigned after Bush named her his top national security aide.