After bombing Venezuela this morning and kidnapping their president, Trump was preening like a peacock. “They’re not going to do that again. We had a lot of oil there. As you know they threw our companies out, and we want it back,” he said. Which, of course is bullshit. Via the Washington Post:
But U.S. companies never owned oil or land in Venezuela, home to the world’s largest proven reserves of crude, and officials didn’t kick them out of the country.
“Trump’s claim that Venezuela has stolen oil and land from the U.S. is baseless,” said Francisco Rodríguez, a Venezuelan economist at the University of Denver.
Nationalization was the culmination of a decades-long effort by administrations of both the right and the left to bring under government control an industry that an earlier leader had largely given away.
The right-wing strongman Juan Vicente Gómez, the military dictator who ruled Venezuela from 1908 until his death in 1935, granted concessions that left three foreign oil companies in control of 98 percent of the Venezuelan market. The country became the world’s second-largest oil producer and largest exporter; oil accounted for over 90 percent of the country’s total exports.
Gómez’s successors tried to seize greater control over the country’s economy. Under President Isaías Medina Angarita, authorities approved a law in 1943 that required foreign oil companies to relinquish half their profits to the government. A 1958 pact signed by Democratic Action, the Democratic Republican Union and the Independent Political Electoral Organization Committee ensured the country’s major political parties had access to oil profits.
By the time Venezuelan lawmakers began debating nationalization legislation in 1975, Rodríguez said, the “writing was on the wall.”
“Nobody was going to resist Venezuela carrying this nationalization to its end, and the U.S. was much more interested in having Venezuela be a provider of oil — relatively cheap oil — than to have a production collapse in Venezuela,” Rodríguez said. The change, consequently, was “relatively uncontroversial.”
President Carlos Andrés Pérez, a social democrat, signed the bill into law that August. In January 1976, Venezuelan state oil company Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. took over the exploration, production, refining and export of oil.
Watch. He’s going to install María Corina Machado, the wealthy right-wing winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, as president. That’s why she’s been sucking up to him. And many of us saw her winning as a rebuke to Trump? Hah.
UPDATE: Not so much.
By the way, if the Mad King actually cared about American energy needs, why has he kneecapped solar and wind energy?
https://bsky.app/profile/achoron.bsky.social/post/3mbjurpmb2226
https://bsky.app/profile/mattpeterson.bsky.social/post/3mbjurmvjnk2j
