Venezuela sells oil to poor at discount

In a resounding gesture of humanitarian internationalism, CITGO, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA, began shipping 12 million gallons of discounted home-heating oil for 45,000 low-income families and local social-service organizations in Massachusetts during the week of Nov. 27.

Venezuela President Hugo Chávez

A similar program is underway in the Bronx, N.Y., and preliminary discussions regarding possible CITGO heating oil subsidies are taking place in Maine and other parts of the U.S. where blistering cold weather is a factor.

Due to Big Oil’s price gouging and restriction on production, home heating oil costs are expected to increase 30 to 50 percent this winter. Venezuela’s offer will help thousands of working class and oppressed people who would have been unable to adequately heat their dwellings and thus risk dying from the cold.

The Massachusetts contract signing took place at a news conference Nov. 22 at the home of Linda Kelly and Paul Kelly in Quincy, Mass. The couple has three children, one with diabetes. Linda Kelly has multiple sclerosis. The Kelly family became eligible for the PDVSA oil subsidies because their state fuel assistance ran out last winter.

“He’s doing the right thing,” said Linda Kelly of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, who arranged the subsidies. Chávez first pledged this life-saving assistance in a meeting with the Rev. Jesse Jackson in Caracas in August. “There were people who were going to freeze to death…. This is huge,” said Kelly.

The discounted heating oil will be available to Massachusetts households receiving federal fuel assistance who have used up their $550 annual federal subsidy. Families would pay about $276 for a 200-gallon shipment, a savings of about $184. The shipment will last about three weeks.

CITGO will deliver the oil, and Citizens Energy, a non-profit organization providing subsidized oil to Massachusetts residents, will distribute it. Then about 350 local dealers will deliver approximately 75 percent of the oil to local families. Mass EnergyConsumer Alliance will distribute or sell the remaining quarter to homeless shelters, food banks and low-income groups.

Venezuela has arranged for 285,000 barrels to be shipped to Massachusetts within the next few weeks at a 40 percent discount.

“This program represents the fulfillment of the promise made to people in the United States by our President, Hugo Chávez,” said Venezuelan envoy Bernardo Alvarez Herrera at the Quincy news conference. “We are committed to working for a hemisphere with less poverty and more development, whether by teaching 1.5 million adults to read in Venezuela or helping Massachusetts residents through a long winter.”

All the major U.S. oil corporations were asked to participate in similar agreements; they all refused despite record-breaking profits in 2005 arising from their decision to reduce production during and after Hurricanes Katrina and Wilma. This decision drove up prices.

The companies have also benefited from billions in federal subsidies. Most of Big Oil’s losses incurred when refineries, pipelines and other infrastructure were destroyed in the hurricanes are expected to be recovered through insurance as well.

According to Standard & Poor’s, ExxonMobil, the world’s largest publicly traded oil corporation, just had its highest-ever quarterly profit, $9.92 billion, up 75 percent from its 2004 third quarter. ExxonMobil also set an indus try record of $100.72 billion in sales. BP-Amoco, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Marathon and Royal Dutch/Shell also had record profits.

In contrast, President Chávez has vowed to set aside 10 percent of all the oil that CITGO refineries produce for his own country’s oil-for-the-poor program. Thus far, Venezuela is providing subsidized or discounted oil to more than 20 nations in South America, the Caribbean and beyond.

Big Oil profits as the poor die

It is testament to the miserable state of affairs in the United States, where profits are placed before human beings, that poor people have to turn to an underdeveloped country like Venezuela, still struggling to industrialize after decades of neocolonialism, to get discounted oil.

Each year in the United States an average of 689 people die from hypothermia, a preventable medical emergency caused by prolonged exposure to cold temperatures, says the federal Centers for Disease Control.

Hypothermia-related deaths are preventable. A disturbing report from the Southern Medical Journal revealed that 61.5 percent of such deaths last winter were among African Americans. The CDC confirmed the Journal’s findings, admitting that insufficient access to heat kills African Americans and Latin@s at a higher rate than whites.

Bolivar’s dream resurrected

Venezuela’s gesture of genuine internationalism, which embraces the working class and oppressed of the U.S., is fundamental to the constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. This document guarantees economics of solidarity and mutual aid, rather than the free trade and neoliberalism that are used to ransack underdeveloped nations, steal their natural resources and put profits in command, resulting in whole countries mired in poverty.

Mutual assistance is part of Venezuela’s foreign policy. Venezuela has championed the Bolivarian Alternative for the Amer icas (ALBA in its Spanish initials) as opposed to the U.S.-sponsored Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). Chávez’s internationalist use of oil wealth threatens the very essence of neocolonialism in South Amer ica as ALBA embraces integration, deve lopment and hemispheric unity as opposed to wholesale imperialist plundering.

The U.S. government and Big Oil are, of course, worried about these developments. They claim that Chávez uses “oil as a weapon” to undermine U.S. foreign policy. Venezuela is not using oil as a weapon, but is using it within the context of South American integration and “21st century socialism,” attempting to encourage U.S client states to shake off the influence of imperialism.