chavez and oil:
The Times went on to claim this action would undermine Venezuela's growth hinting Big Oil's threat to leave might get Chavez to back down enough to get them to stay. It never happened as this writer suggested April 12 in an article titled "Wall Street Journal and New York Times Attack journalism." The article made it clear oil exploration and production in Venezuela is so profitable that even with a smaller share of the profits US, European and other Big Oil investors wouldn't dream of leaving. Whine plenty, leave, not likely, and now we know they won't.
(...) Hugo Chavez, in fact, is a self-proclaimed social democrat charting his own independent course toward progressive "21st century socialism" along the lines Latin American expert James Petras calls the "pragmatic left" in contrast to the more "radical left" of Colombia's FARC guerrillas; elements of "teachers and peasant-indigenous movements in Oaxaca, Guerrero and Chiapas in Mexico;" many "small Marxist groups in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and elsewhere;" and Venezuela's "peasant and barrio movements," among others. Other Latin American leaders Petras calls "pragmatic" leftists include Bolivia's Evo Morales, Cuba's Castro and many "large electoral parties and major peasant and trade unions in Central and South America" including Mexico's PRD party, El Salvador's FMLN, Chile's Communist Party, "the majority in Peruvian (Ollanta) Humala's parliamentary party;" and others including "the great majority of left Latin American intellectuals."
(...) Hugo Chavez offers them a new choice having announced in March he intends creating a Bank of the South social democratic alternative to the repressive neoliberal Washington Consensus IMF-World Bank model. So far Bolivia and Argentina have agreed to be part of it with Chavez hoping other Latin countries will join as well by contributing 10% of their capital reserves for this enterprise he hopes will be operating by summer.
(...) Additional parts of Chavez's plan involve forging stronger ties to other oil importing nations like China to reduce Venezuela's dependency on a hostile US. He also announced April 29 the nation hopes to gradually sell its seven US-based Citgo refineries replacing them with a new Latin American-based network in Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Haiti and Dominica. It's part of his plan to provide the region a stable oil supply and 100% of the energy needs for Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) members and Haiti.
(...) Further, Journal writers take aim at PDVSA demeaning it as a state-run company claiming it has "little focus" because Chavez turned it into a "poverty-alleviation ministry." As a result, the Journal says it became inefficient and its production fell from 3.1 million barrels a day when Chavez first took office in 1999 to 2.4 million barrels a day now according to US government Energy Information Administration (EIA) figures that look to have been cooked to bring them down. They're disputable with differing ones coming from alternate sources including the 2006 CIA World Factbook listing Venezuela's daily production at slightly under 3.1 million daily barrels, around the same figure PDVSA reported then including extra-heavy crude from Orinoco belt production. In May, 2006, Venezuelan Minister of Petroleum and Energy, Raphael Ramirez indicated the International Energy Agency (IEA) recognized the nation's daily oil production at over 3 million daily barrels while the government reports it now at 3.3 million compared to 2.6 million or less claimed by international oil analysts and EIA deliberately understating oil output the way Washington and the West distort everything positive about Venezuela under Hugo Chavez.
(...) All it can say, with a heavy-handed dose of sour grapes, is that "Mixing oil and politics may not help Mr. Chavez in the long run" as he'll need "private companies' expertise to develop the heavy crude in the Orinoco region" without ever conceding he already has it and a long line of takers ready to step in if any now there foolishly leave. They won't, but don't expect to see that opinion reported anywhere in the Wall Street Journal as they'd then have to admit everything they wrote earlier was false and misleading. They don't have to. You just read it here.