Hightower Lowdown

It's embarrassing that George W keeps trying to deceive the American public about developments in Iraq, but it's shameful that the media establishment blithely goes along, parroting Bush's deceit. Take Bush's high-pressure push to ram his new oil law through the Iraqi Parliament. The official line is that this is a healing measure that would provide for a fair distribution of oil profits among Iraq's Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds --and its passage is the number-one non military benchmark that the White House has set to measure Iraqi "progress." Major media outlets in our country have swallowed Bush's line whole, frequently and unquestioningly reporting that, for some reason, those quarrelsome Iraqis can't even agree on something as basic as sharing oil revenues. There have been several impatient editorials demanding that Baghdad get on with it. Truth is, this is not about sharing profits, but about a cynical power grab by multinational oil giants. Big Oil got the Bushites to write a provision into the proposed law that would open two thirds of Iraq's oil fields to ownership by foreign corporations--unlike Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Iran which all control their oil drilling and extraction. In short, the law would force Iraq to surrender sovereignty over its most valuable economic resource-and that's why it is not passing. One thing the nation's politicians all can see is just how vehement public opposition to Big Oil's law is. So when you see stories about Bush, Cheney and others imploring Iraq's Parliament to pass this law --remember, they're not promoting national reconciliation, they're promoting a shameful oil scam.