Well it isn't in an retail oil/petrol trade magazine that's entirely funded by advertising from the oil & petroleum industry (stop me if I'm wrong). Furthermore the Citgo article has the stench of a advert deal and an editorial initiated by sales…
Stop, you're wrong. NPN has been editorially independent since we spoke out against Standard Oil in 1909. Advertising is not linked to editorial. Now, Citgo does advertise, as do a lot of companies (though few oil companies actually), but you don't stay in business for 95 years by running advertorials.
What is surprising, is your take on the article’s slant. I’ll just put it down to your ignorance of the oil industry and the magazine and its readership. Considering the integration of Citgo and PdVSA pointing out the political instabilities hardly serves Citgo, but it does serve our readers who own chains of gas stations and wholesale operations and decide if they want to brand Citgo, or Mobil or whatever. Citgo did a great job dealing with the loss in Venezuelan production during the strike, which, given their supply dynamics (50 percent crude from Venezuela) was an accomplishment worthy of reporting. Equally worth reporting (but hardly favorable), was the continued political unrest and potential supply disruptions and even the potential sale of Citgo to Nigerian or Malaysian oil concerns.
I see Citgo is a wholly owned subsidiary of Petroleos de Venezuela S.A., the company whose entire board was sacked by Chavez in January 2002 and then mostly reinstated a couple of weeks later, a move that angered it's executives. No sour grapes there, then.
LOL, not by me or by Citgo’s top executive at the time. I asked Oswaldo Contreras, Citgo’s CEO, just how stable things were with the PdVSA/Citgo/Chavez relationship (largely related to debt and funding issues, as well as political). He assured me all was well -- seemed very positive -- a good counterpoint (on message of course) to the other stuff I would be pointing out. Not a bad guy for an ex Venezuelan General, very affable and casual. Two weeks later and he’s sacked, which required quite the rewrite past deadline. I bet there are some sour grapes now, but then he wasn’t really one of those Western capitalist types to begin with. Chavez appointed him CEO in 2000, though apparently he was more Ali Rodriguez’s guy (see below).
According to Petroleumworld.com, a Web site focused on the Venezuelan and Latin American oil industry, this is just another page in a recent fight for control of the company between Chavez and his Fifth Republic Movement, or MVR party, PdVSA president Ali Rodriguez a senior member of the Nation For All, or PPT party and the Venezuelan military. Although PPT is a leftist party that has been aligned with MVR since 1999, it is also a competitive party that is increasingly seen as being more opponent than ally, according to local analysts.
Your link is hardly unbiased.
It is clear that the configuration of the liberal democratic state is not capable of achieving sustainable environmental and economic outcomes. At the core of this incapacity is the contraction in political participation, and the limiting of discursive dialogue, accorded to citizens and non-citizens by the institutions of the western nation-state. It is therefore appropriate that groups such as FEASTA - dedicated to a solution-based approach - initiate, and complement existing, debate and reflection on constructing alternative democratic models.
The assumption that Chavez bartering oil with Castro for Panama hats will somehow convince the Saudi’s to barter oil with Switzerland for fine chocolates or switch to euros even, is a bit of a stretch now. Though if things did get nasty politically to the point where it was worth a wold-wide financial crisis to put the US in its place you just might see it (the euros that is).
As it stands in today’s world (not the Star Trek one we would all like to see, myself included) the problem with reverting to a backwater national oil company is that Venezuela already has a number of challenges without Chavez. The crude is heavy and sour, requiring a special refining infrastructure to process economically. Citgo has that, along with a solid marketing infrastructure in the USA, but there’s been talk of his selling Citgo as part of his regional initiatives. Citgo and PdVSA were also set to expand throughout Latin America, and now that’s been halted (a bit counter even to what is suggested in your link). From the US perspective, all oil supplies are important these days, but the 13 percent crude the USA receive from Venezuela could be adjusted even further downward (it was 19% in 1997) given a little time.
Of course the Bush administration would like to see him removed (for self-serving oil related reasons), but frankly so does anyone with anything going on in Venezuela. Chavez promises bribes to the unemployed (who are also getting a bit tired of not seeing all that manna fall from heave after a decade), while the radicals tend to be just about anyone with a job -- not just senior management. I’m not a big fan of the Bush administration’s international policy and acknowledge our history of banana dictatorships and neocolonialism in the region. But supporting a Chavez “democracy” is stretching things quite a bit.
Charon
