How come we never hear news about Madagascar? They have three times the population of Libya. I have never seen an article about Madagascar, yet countless articles on Libya.
Good grief, Libya has only six million people; Minnesota has 5.2 million. How can such a small country create so many mainstream stories? Are people in Libya just more interesting than people in Madagascar?
The answer, of course, is beneath the sand. Forty-eight-and -a-half-billion barrels of crude oil per year is why the United States Government’s media is so obsessed with the lives of these six million people. Landwise Libya is huge. You can just about fit the state of Texas into Libya three times over. Libya is the sixth most sparsely populated country on earth.
On March 17th, 2014, the Navy SEALS “seized” a renegade tanker carrying illicit Libyan oil that several U.S. companies had stake in. Does the U.S. military have jurisdiction everywhere, able to arrest and seize anyone or everything? Would they bother if it was a tanker filled with “illicit” olive oil? Nope, America does not run on olive oil. The U.S. State Department considered the shipment a “theft from the Libyan people,” no Washington, you have that backwards.
Ibrahim Jathran is a 33-year-old “rebel” leader of a “militia” who is trying his best to hold the Libyan government accountable to the people of Libya. In the eyes of the U.S. he was first a friend while fighting against Gadhafi, and was “initially named to lead a force protecting the oil infrastructure,” but he probably stepped aside when he saw he would be protecting corruption.
What he has now done is ally himself “with the so-called federalist movement demanding more power, autonomy and oil revenue for the nation’s eastern region which contains most of Libya’s reserves.”
Sorry Washington, this is the guy who is truly and honestly trying to stop “theft from the Libyan people,” and was attempting to sell Libyan oil, oil from his own land to finance his people and his cause. For some reason the U.S. government and the oil companies it supports, believe Libyan oil is more their oil than Jathran’s oil. Soon he will be labeled a terrorist, but if he wasn’t stepping on the financial toes of the gas-guzzling western world, this guy would be a U.S. media darling, a modern day Robin Hood.
He has blocked the ports and refuses to reopen them until the central government agrees to investigate allegations of corruption in its oil sales. He is fighting corruption and wants to see the people of eastern Libya, where the oil comes from, get their fair share.
Really now, where is all this Libya oil money going? You have a country of only six million people, the average income is only $12,000 a year, yet Libya produces 48 billion barrels. That’s a lot of oil. Where is all the profit going?
Frank Erickson lives in Minneapolis.
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