Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez is offering cheap oil to low-income families in Boston and New York for 40% less than market value:
To the anger of many in Washington, Citgo Petroleum Corporation, a company controlled by the Venezuelan Government, will supply more than 45 million litres of oil at 40 per cent below market prices.
The deal is one of the most spectacular moves yet in Mr Chavez’s attempt to market his ’21st-century socialism’ using his country’s oil wealth.
While it will not change many minds in Washington about his populist and autocratic regime, Caracas hopes it will bolster Mr Chavez’s claim as the coming leader of an anti-capitalist Latin America. Mr Chavez, who once dubbed President George Bush a ‘genocidal madman’ and led a huge anti-US protest earlier this month, first proposed his fuel offer in August when oil prices were at a record high after Hurricane Katrina.
It’s interesting that Chavez’s path to power has been through organizations such as the “Bolivarian Revolution” and other such organizations based mostly on a Latinized version of the old-style communist societies.
Bolivarianism, or a specialized brand of democratic socialism based on a Cuban-Venezuelan axis, is the ideology being born here; a new form of “liberation theology”. Chavez has been deeply criticized by the business community as well as the Roman Catholic Church for eroding civil rights and attempting to indoctrinate his “Bolivarianism” upon rural Venezuelans.
Ways to fight back? Don’t go to Citgo.