To: Augustus Gloop who wrote (5030 ) 3/29/2003 11:28:39 AM From: Hawkmoon Respond to Halliburton Co. (NYSE:HAL - News) is out of the running for a massive U.S. government contract for reconstruction in Iraq, the Agency for International Development (AID) said on Friday. newsmax.com Gore's Elk Hills/Occidental Oil Scandal: Bigger Than Teapot Dome Vice President Al Gore endorsed the sale of a government oil field in 1998, the largest sale of federal property in the history of the U.S. government. By selling off this resource the Clinton/Gore team eliminated the U.S. Navy's primary source of emergency crude oil. They argued that this field "no longer serves a national security purpose." We view this asset as becoming the crown jewel of our domestic operations," said Occidental Oil and Gas C.E.O. David Hentschel.... The sale of this government oil field to Occidental Petroleum may have directly benefited Al Gore through his ownership of Occidental stock. While his aides denied Gore encouraged this sale, his booklet "Reinventing Government" called on the government to sell these precious oil reserves. Gore wrote "...Elk Hills Naval Petroleum Reserves... no longer serves its original strategic purpose for the Navy." corpwatch.org That was good news for Gore. Despite controversy over Dick Cheney's plans to keep stock options if elected, most Americans don't know that we already have a vice president with oil company stocks. Before the Elk Hills sale, Al Gore controlled between $250,000-$500,000 of Occidental stock (he is executor of a trust that he says goes only to his mother, but will revert to him upon her death). After the sale, Gore began disclosing between $500,000 and $1 million of his significantly more valuable stock..... In 1997, after Gore's recommendation the land be sold, Oxy bought the region from the federal government for $3.7 billion. The sale represented a tripling of the company's U.S. oil reserves. Mired for years by declining reserves, Occidental's revenues for the first quarter of this year showed a dramatic 87 percent increase from the same period in 1999, before it began operations in the Elk Hills.
