Thread: Chavez offers cheap gas to poor in U.S.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/americas/ ... line.reut/

Chavez offers cheap gas to poor in U.S.

Tuesday, August 23, 2005; Posted: 7:29 p.m. EDT (23:29 GMT)


HAVANA, Cuba (Reuters) -- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, popular with the poor at home, offered on Tuesday to help needy Americans with cheap supplies of gasoline.

"We want to sell gasoline and heating fuel directly to poor communities in the United States," the populist leader told reporters at the end of a visit to Communist-run Cuba.

Chavez did not say how Venezuela would go about providing gasoline to poor communities. Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA owns Citgo, which has 14,000 gas stations in the United States.

The offer may sound attractive to Americans feeling pinched by soaring prices at the pump but not to the U.S. government, which sees Chavez as a left-wing troublemaker in Latin America.

Gasoline is cheaper than mineral water in oil-producing Venezuela, where consumers can fill their tanks for less than $2. Average gas prices have risen to $2.61 a gallon in the United States, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Chavez said Venezuela could supply gasoline to Americans at half the price they now pay if intermediaries who "speculated ... and exploited consumers" were cut out.

Venezuela supplies Cuba with generously financed oil and plans to help Caribbean nations foot their oil bills.

Chavez, in Cuba to attend the graduation of Cuban-trained doctors from 28 countries, was seen off at the airport by Cuban President Fidel Castro. Washington has accused the two leaders of being a destabilizing influence in South America.

Chavez and Castro offered to give poor Americans free health care and train doctors free of charge.

Chavez said Venezuela could supply gasoline to Americans at half the price they now pay if intermediaries who "speculated ... and exploited consumers" were cut out.

IS this why he is hated so much by the globalists?

Chavez and Castro offered to give poor Americans free health care and train doctors free of charge.

Unlike our government, they are offering free health care. To American Citizens. Oh I forgot Our government is offering free health care. To illegal Immigrants and not to the Citizens.

That's pretty sad when a foreign leader is trying to do more for our people then our own government.

Gasoline is cheaper than mineral water in oil-producing Venezuela, where consumers can fill their tanks for less than $2. Average gas prices have risen to $2.61 a gallon in the United States, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Well after taking my daily ride around town, with my window today. Saying Our government is letting companies outsorce our jobs and the rest of them are being taking by Illegals. I had to stop for gas and the price went up here today, 37 cents.

I havent done much research on Chavez, is he a dictator? I just filled up my gas tank and spent $35.00 for a half tank of gas!

jp,

I read somewhere that he is antiglobalization, I wonder if this is the reason he is in the news as the new bogeyman lately.

The poor people of his country seem to love him.

I also read that 5% of the people own 80% of the land.

He has also brought in 17,000 Doctors and Nurses for the poor from Cuba

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0825/p01s04-woam.html

according to this article he is antiglobalization and in another article he calls President Bush Mr. Danger.

I am interested in finding out as much as I can about him also.

Here are some articles that are interesting.




from the June 02, 2005 edition

Property tug of war hits Venezuela



The owners of Hato Piñero, a 200,000-acre nature reserve, are in a land dispute with the government.

By Danna Harman | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

HATO PIÑERO, VENEZUELA – Jaime Branger's great-great-grandfather was the first in his family to reach the shores of Venezuela. It was the end of the 19th century, and he had set off from Corsica to Panama to partake in building the canal - but got sidetracked and ended up here. He married a local woman, saved pennies working as a mapmaker, and soon began buying plots of land: a few acres here, a small farm there.
In time, the acres added up, and when, in 1950, "Don" Antonio Julio, Branger's great-uncle, inherited several of the family holdings, he became one of the biggest landowners in the country. He created a successful cattle ranch with 11,000 cows, along with a private nature reserve that has become a mecca for bird-watchers from around the world.

Now the government wants to take it all away.

"He loved this place," says Jaime, the Don's strapping nephew, who today oversees the family's 200,000-acre cattle farm, called Hato Piñero. "He would be heartbroken now."

If President Hugo Chávez has his way, Hato Piñero (www.hatopinero.com), along with other large private land holdings across the country, will soon be parceled out as part of Venezuela's "revolution for the poor." Mr. Chávez's land-reform program envisions impoverished peasants and families from city slums coming to the countryside to farm expropriated land the government has deemed underutilized.

The plan, depending on one's perspective, makes Chávez either Robert Mugabe - the Zimbabwean leader who took land from wealthy farmers and gave it to the poor, only to see the country's agricultural sector and economy take a nosedive - or Abraham Lincoln, who through the 1862 Homestead Act turned the dream of property ownership into a reality for the masses.

Either way, says Steve Ellner, a professor of politics at Venezuela's University of the East, "What is clear is the old system needs changing. But whether this is a viable new model is unclear."

Much land in few hands

In this oil-rich country of 25 million, just 3 million people live in rural areas, and most food - including staples like beans, corn, milk, sugar, beef, and chicken - is imported. The government says 97 percent of rural land is owned by just 10 percent of the population.

When Chávez's land-reform bill was passed in November 2001, it helped trigger massive protests by opposition groups, paralyzing the country that winter. The issue then died down, as the government began redistributing its own massive land holdings first. All told, 5.4 million acres - of some 27 million acres - of unused government land was handed out to 135,000 poor families.

Then last January, private landowners were told their land was next. Letters were sent to medium and large landowners demanding property titles be produced dating back to 1848 (the year private land holdings were first registered). Inspectors from the National Land Institute (INTI) fanned out across the country to "investigate" what the lands were being used for and by whom.

At Hato Piñero, two-dozen men showed up with maps and GPS devices and stayed for a month: measuring, surveying, eating, and sleeping at the ranch. Meanwhile, Mr. Branger put together a seven-person team of lawyers and historians to prove his family's ties to the ranch. So far, his team has handed over transfer-of-ownership documents dating back to 1884, but have not been able to get earlier records certified because they are in the National Archive where there is one lone transcriber.

In mid-March, INTI made its assessment: Five ranches, including Piñero and nearby Charcote - one of Venezuela's top beef-producing ranches, owned by Vestey Group, a British food company - were to be redistributed. The lands were deemed public property and "mostly unproductive," according to the INTI statement. The owners had two months to respond before action was taken.

"We believe that the land agency has been badly advised," Diana Dos Santos, president of the Vestey subsidiary here, said at a press conference last month.

Days before the May deadline, Branger and others appealed INTI's decision in the courts, temporarily slowing down any action against them. "At the end of the day, the government can do whatever they want to us and our land," admits Branger, "but we will not give them any excuse to catch us [napping]." The Vestey Group, meanwhile, may take the case to international arbitration under a Venezuela-British investment-protection agreement.

In Hato Piñero's case, there is an additional element at play. As Branger explains, 75 percent of the land is gallery forests and flood plains that cannot be used for ranching and are maintained as a reserve. Nature lovers from around the world come here, paying $100 a night, to catch a glimpse of tapirs, yellow-knobbed curassows, and jaguars. Branger and other environmentalists are concerned that a government takeover of the land would lead to the depredation of areas in need of protection.

Chávez supporters argue, in turn, that the Brangers are using their conservation efforts as a ruse to protect privilege rather than the ecosystem. "No private owner can manage the biological and forest reserves for their own benefit, exploiting as a tourist business this resource that belongs to the whole country," INTI President Eliécer Otaiza said last month. "This land belongs to all of us."

The Abraham Lincoln of Venezuela?

Unlike other, unsuccessful, land-reform programs in the 1970s, the Venezuelan government this time is promising to form cooperatives, instruct the new farmers, and forbid resale of the land. Initially, at least, the government will be the legal owner of the land. Because of this, says Seth DeLong of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs in Washington, the proper historical parallel with what Chávez is doing is Lincoln during the Civil War.

"As with the Homestead Act, the Chávez government retains ownership of the land until such time as the land is deemed productive by the country's Land Institute," he says.

Far away from Hato Piñero, in Caracas's poor Pinto Salina neighborhood, Manuel Romero has heard about the government offer of land to the poor. Though he is not sure exactly how or what he would farm, he is vaguely interested, he says, in "anything that will bring in more money." He currently makes about $80 a month - more than most Venzeualans, 60 percent of whom live on $2 a day or less, according to government statistics.

His eldest daughter, Nuri, laughs at the idea. "What us? Ranchers?" she teases. "Perhaps Chávez can work such magic."

• Ms. Harman is Latin America bureau chief for the Monitor and USA Today.

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0825-30.htm

Published on Thursday, August 25, 2005 by the New York Daily News

Oil Fat Cats vs. Hugo Chavez
by Juan Gonzales

I pulled into the Mobil gas station on 11th Ave. in Manhattan yesterday for my weekly stickup from the oil companies.
Their take this time was an astonishing $3.05 per gallon for premium unleaded.

"Every three or four days the price goes up," said Patel, the man in charge of the station. "Lots of complaints from my customers."

Complaints from everyone except oil executives.

Last year, Exxon/Mobil, the world's largest corporation, posted the highest profits of any company in history - more than $25 billion. The oil giant, based in Irving, Tex., is on track to shatter that mark this year, with revenues that now approach $1 billion per day.

Which brings me to Pat Robertson and Hugo Chavez.

Robertson, the right-wing evangelist and friend of the Bush family, publicly called this week for the U.S. government to kill - or at least kidnap - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

"This is a dangerous enemy to our south, controlling a huge pool of oil, that could hurt us badly," Robertson said. His less-than-Christian remarks ignited an outcry and forced him to issue an apology of sorts, though he still insisted that he had at least "focused our government's attention on a growing problem."

That "problem," quite simply, is that Chavez, a radical populist who has been voted into office repeatedly by huge majorities in his own country, controls the largest reserve of petroleum outside the Middle East.

Neither Robertson, nor former oil executives George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice, nor their buddies at Exxon/Mobil, Chevron, etc., are happy about all this.

Even more scandalous for Big Oil, Chavez is using Venezuela's windfall not to fatten his own country's oligarchy but to benefit the Venezuelan poor and help neighboring countries.

Yesterday, while Robertson was issuing his half-baked Chavez clarification, the Venezuelan president was in Montego Bay, Jamaica, where he announced a new oil agreement with that country's prime minister, P.J. Patterson.

Under the agreement, Venezuela will supply 22,000 barrels of oil a day to Jamaica for a mere $40 a barrel. That's far lower than the current world price of about $65 a barrel. With the price of gasoline in that destitute nation already more than $3.50 a gallon, the Chavez plan means more than half a million dollars a day in savings for Jamaica on oil imports.

Chavez also announced his government will provide $60 million in foreign aid to Jamaica and finance the upgrading of that country's oil refineries.

The agreement is part of a broader Chavez plan called Petrocaribe, which he unveiled at a Caribbean summit in Venezuela last June.

At that conference, Chavez offered the same kind of deal to the leaders of more than a dozen other neighboring nations, including Dominican Republic President Leonel Fernandez and Cuba's Fidel Castro.

Fernandez jumped at the offer because his government is nearly bankrupt from oil prices. Last year, the Dominican Republic spent $1.2 billion on oil imports; this year, it expects to fork out more than $3 billion. The price of gasoline in Santo Domingo has zoomed past $4 a gallon in recent days.

Pat Robertson looks at Chavez and sees a devilish danger. He wants our government to "take him out." Over at the White House, Bush and his aides may use more restrained language, but their goals are not much different.

But there's a whole different view down in Latin America, where a half-dozen nations have seen liberal and populist governments swept into office in recent years.

Down there, Chavez has become the new miracle man of oil. Unlike Exxon/Mobil and the Big Oil fat cats, who wallow in their record profits while the rest of us pay, Chavez is spreading the wealth around.

A dangerous man, indeed.

© 2005 New York Daily News




http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Conten ... 8350116795



Robertson rant sign of U.S. anger over Chavez


HARRY STERLING

Thou shalt not kill. Unless, according to American evangelist Pat Robertson, the target is Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

During remarks on a television program the controversial far-right evangelist denounced Chavez as a "terrific threat" to U.S. interests and said he should be assassinated to prevent him from becoming a launching pad for the infiltration of communism and Muslim extremism in the western hemisphere.

According to Robertson, a 1998 presidential candidate, killing Chavez would be "... a whole lot cheaper than starting a war."

Although the U.S. State Department described Robertson's inflammatory remarks â€â€

Darlene,
Thanks for the links. I kind of figured it had more to with Chavez being against globalization as well as his public denouncement of CAFTA and the FTAA.

Chavez is wanting to "do the job the American" government won't do!!!

I thought all them were in favor of "free trade" -- I guess that's just for Corporate America --- not the American people