Joe For Oil

Has anyone seen this commercial ? Joe Kennedy promoting Citizens Energy which is an oil company that provides subsidized heating oil for low income families. In said commercial he thanks Hugo Chavez for his assistance and mentions that Citgo is the only big oil company that was willing to help.

What an embarrassment that the other US based big oil companies would not help with all the money they make.

 

Ok it was late and I was a bit lazy in my writing. Ragu does a great job of laying out what Citizens is all about. Next up free oil from Iran.

 

To write Citgo is the only personal playground of dictatorships is flat-out wrong.

 

Hasn't the poverty rate declined under Chavez?

He's not a good guy, certainly - but were the people of Venezuela better off when companies like Royal Dutch Shell were taking their oil profits out of the country? Venezuela's been one of the few oil producers over the last century to successfully defend itself against the sort of predatory wealth extraction we see in other resource-rich countries.

 

Not according to the story in last week's New Yorker -- Letters from Caracas by Jon Lee Anderson.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/01/28/130128fa_fact_anderson

"LETTER FROM CARACAS about the Tower of David, which is the world’s tallest slum, and the man who runs it, Alexander (El Niño) Daza. Hugo Chávez has said that he wants to remake Venezuela into “a sea of happiness and of real social justice and peace.” His pronounced goal was to elevate the poor. In Caracas, the country’s capital, the results of his fitful campaign are plain to see. For decades, as one of the world’s most oil-rich nations, Venezuela had a growing middle class, with an impressively high standard of living. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the rest of Latin America and from Europe helped give Caracas a reputation as one of the region’s most attractive and modern cities. That city is barely perceptible today. After decades of neglect, poverty, corruption, and social upheaval, Caracas has deteriorated beyond all measure. It has one of the highest homicide rates in the world; last year, in a city of three million, an estimated thirty-six hundred people were murdered, or about one every two hours. The murder rate in Venezuela has tripled since Chávez took office. Caracas is a failed city, and the Tower of David is perhaps the ultimate symbol of that failure.

 

I don't live in the Northeast, so the short answer is no, I haven't seen it.

 

That sure sounds like a veritable Utopia compared to the years before Chavez took over... Dude's a saint.

 

Wow. If what Chavez does is so bad, then perhaps those staunch defenders of democracy and clean politics like Exxon/Mobil, BP, etc., should divert a small portion of the billions and billions of their profits and start similar but larger programs in this country to save those poor people without the means to pay for heating oil, Joe Kennedy, and all those corrupt congressmen from falling under Hugo's mystical evil spell.

Or, maybe those elderly, poor, disabled and others without the means to pay the high cost of heating oil will just continue to take some measure of aid from Citgo so they can stay warm in the winter, and somehow still not turn into socialists, communists or wobblies.

Poor Americans receiving free oil from dictatorships like Venezuela = bad.
Rich corporations sending American jobs overseas to dictatorships like China, Vietnam, etc. to save labor costs = good.

 

I'm just glad Exxon or Shell do not support dictatorships in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states.