More to the point, we have been doing it with the Saudi's, the Omani's, the Kuwaiti's, the UAE, Qatar....you get my drift?

I don't know. Do you get my drift? Cuz it wuz kinda mine. You just added some countries to it. Whatever. I liked your post yesterday on Qatar. I don't really understand your post here. I'm not a big fan of capitals/shouting or cut-and-paste-carets.

Um, 911 was made in America

CNN: 85% of Americans believe in a US Cover Up of 911.

Noone can account for the failure of WTC7
or how the antenae on WTC N fails first while it's bolted to
the core.  Or that NORAD is still lying about it's timeline
or Cheney's quote-via Mineta,to the military officer saying Flight 77 is 100, then 50, then 25 miles out-"Do the Orders still stand?"-"Of course the orders still stand.  You haven't heard anything different have you?

James

I really do not want to confuse issues here with
gasoline inventory record drops and crude at $67.50
per bbl and at a record in the UK, but we're going to
get 911 facts strait here.

Grow, grow, grow.

Good thing we live on a sphere, or we'd run out of space.

But I think that I have made this clear. Nothing I have ever said would suggest that I can be classified as either a supporter or detractor of the man.

While I have one definition of dictator and of free elections, I know these things have different interpretations. I am a citizen of the world, I understand the differences.

He is simply a fascinating character.

For $30 million dollars a year(and a suitable security detail) he and Rafael can hire me as their chief consultant on the US. I know they already pay somebody else more to do the same thing. Are they happy with the results? - ask them.

See, "democracy" doesn't really mean democracy, it means "free market capitalism."  We said we wanted democracy in Iraq, but were dismayed when the Islamicists won.  We said we wanted "democracy" in the West Bank, but pitched a fit when Hamas won.  Clearly, it's not really "democracy" we want.  

Once you understand that "democracy" is a codeword for free market capitalism, it all makes sense.  Chavez is "undemocratic" because he's bad for business.

"keep your amateur political philosophizing to yourself unless you can back it up with facts!"

You are a fucking jackass.

You just said a bunch of stuff. Where are your "facts."

You "could" say the same stuff about Bush. Why don't you? You did say those things to Prof. Goose. And your statements were just as stupid then as they don't exist now. I think I responded to your nonsense back then, too. Is that why you confront me now? A grudge?

I never offered my "amateur political philosophizing" as anything more than that.

But now you have a serious problem. You have to somehow prove with "facts" that you are not a jackass.

Somehow, I don't know how, you missed everything else I said about Chavez. This has to be a grudge.

I, of course, have plenty of "evidence." And can afford to sit on it.

Squirm away.

Oh, and in case I didn't make myself clear...

Fuck You

The truth is, we really don't support democracy.  Democratic nations have an unfortunate tendency to do things that are not in our interest.  We say we want democracy, but it's only lip service.  

This is an old thread, so I hope posting this in its entirety is not a problem.

http://www.vcrisis.com/index.php?content=letters/200603211834

A dictator is a dictator.

Hugo Chavez, Demagogue
By Pedro Camargo

21.03.06 | Hugo Chavez is in command and he wants you to profiteer from his dirty business scams. With no judicial integrity, with the media being shuttered, and with no independent government function, as all is under his control, any who do business in Venezuela do business solely with and through the Chavez circle. The Caracas government, as such, is simply an extortion racket for protection schemes. Those who do not pay to play in Caracas are either dead or hounded out or selling Hugo Chavez look-alike dolls on the street corner.

Hugo Chavez is a demagogue. A demagogue is defined as, "a person who tries to stir up the people by appeals to emotion, prejudice, etc., in order to win them over quickly and so gain power." Chavez is a demagogue and that is not the only thing he is up to. Every time Chavez lets lose his now standard demagogic vitriol, he is trying to control and manipulate events. This communist caudillo habitually takes over Venezuelan air waves each week-end, commanding center stage, to rant and rave like a manipulative, scolding, aggravating wife.

Hugo Chavez is trying to manipulate, among several agenda items, global oil prices to pad his personal wallet and increase his political buying capital. Each and every time Chavez opens his long-winded vitriol against the U.S., oil prices spike and Chavez and his cronies make profit. Every time Chavez's paid protesters blow up a gas or oil pipeline, oil and gas prices spike as well, as increase costly repairs and police-military expenditures. Of course, Chavez's paid propaganda agents remind us to not complain when the Chavez agents of doom and harm come their way. Silence is required of these minions. Any who speak out or question the wisdom of Chavez's Bolivarian take-over profiteering plan is silenced or forced in to serving as a complicit enabler of the regime. These habitual dyspeptic, and at times racist and misogynistic, screeches of the harpy Chavez-as-desperate-housewife are more than some lithium-induced hysteria by Chavez, although that could be a factor as well. We suspect this is more about control.

While some claim that Chavez's tirades are a diversionary tactic to steer the public away from the collapsing infrastructure that his regime has failed to maintain or to divert attention from his clique's criminality and nation-looting, we sense more of a mania underway. Hugo Chavez is out of control as the cameras role while his plan goes apace.

Every time oil prices spike based on some perceived, real or engineered geo-political instability, energy speculators potentially make billions. We are not referring to refineries or drillers but offshore, dark, opaque, tax-evading speculators. Hugo Chavez is their toyboy: he sets up regional instability in oil and gas producing zones -both physical and political- which drives up energy costs and makes for Chavez new income in two ways: price per barrel jumps and his gaggle of inner group speculators make money.

This one-trick pony, populated mostly by offshore global oil speculators, is driving the Chavez administration. Without Chavez's absurd vitriol and his total control of his own media, Chavez's dirty speculations -aka price fixing and profiteering from staged, well planned attacks- would not progress.

To cover over these criminal acts, Chavez has set about to convince the world that he is a benign, charitable leader. To do this, he sells reduced rate oil to some groups. But closer inspection shows us that the vendors for Chavez's reduced oil are simply new found political puppets: mouthpieces of the new Left who are willing to take Chavez's oil. In return, these new found oil vendors must be willing to sit by passively as Chavez rails against the United States and rails against functional democracies. Chavez is selling a goofy, incomplete democracy which is actually a bastardized communism. All who profiteer from Chavez know that dealing with Chavez carries strings. One of the major strings of doing business with Chavez is this: his cronies are required to be complicit with him to denounce the benefits of free trade and functional democracy.

Recall that the converse of free trade is either dependency on centrist state hand outs or abject isolationism in wretched poverty. Chavez entices his oil-for-political influence peddling through monetary graft whole attaching riders of complicity to support an end to free trade and functional democracy.

To this anti-free trade political swap or rider, Chavez also carries a message that democracy needs to be redefined. That is, democracy, to Hugo Chavez, must be rejiggered to mean something else entirely. And that something else that Chavez seeks is, by his own words, a non-democratic statehood controlled by a powerful central actor who co-opts the courts, the media, the military and police, as well as education and healthcare. This is supposedly to "help" the poor. But as we know, it is the crueler attack on the "poor" that exists. Poverty is never alleviated when justice is perverted, a police state exists, schools teach revolutionary propaganda and not career building tools, medicine is spotty and under badly trained Cuban neighborhood agents of no real medical training except -at best- triage nurses and any free speech is shuttered or bought out.

Chavez's oil for political bribes is exactly that. Any who sit at table with Chavez are part of his dirty schemes. One becomes known by the company one keeps.

Double-speak remains double-speak. Oil bribes for political favor remains oil-bribes for political favor.

What do we make of those who make the self-enriching deals with Hugo Chavez on cut-rate oil? We know that this is a political game of bribery by dirty oil profiteering. We would do well to denounce these mute spectators. Once bribed, there is no free speech, no openness and no independence from Chavez who demands total dependence and allegiance. No one openly criticizes Chavez for fear of reprisals. This fear of reprisal is quite real and is reflected in the absurd murder and crime rates in Venezuela, which reflect the gross spikes in political assassinations, if any care to actually review the crime statistics in that land, which contains impossibly unjustifiably over-the-top murder rates, reflecting a death-for-hire schemata by local thugs to remove large numbers of undesirables. When one is bought by Chavez, one stays bought.

Chavez is so enamored of his greed that he now refuses to disclose basic business practices of his hand-held PDVSA-CITGO pocketbook. He refuses to even present requisite audits to the US SEC and refuses standard business principles. This is because he wants none to grasp how illegal PDVSA and CITGO are today by his hand. Any who purchase PDVSA-CITGO oil do so today at the expense of standard, globally accepted business practices, knowing full well that they are buying dirty oil. Dirty oil which comes at he expense of the people of Venezuela whose lives are deteriorating so that Chavez can continue his megalomaniacal global take over plan of hatred and instability for neo-communists.

PDVSA and CITGO are no longer functioning, legitimate corporations. To be sure, PDVSA-CITGO still refine heavy crude, albeit increasingly spotty as well, and still have some gasoline stations in the U.S.. But this is not a normal corporation and as such, has broken U.S. and international regulations and laws to such an extent that its corruption is quite apparent. All who participate with this corrupt group, previously known as PDVSA-CITGO, are dealing with corrupt actors and are today tainted with the stench of that same corruption.

Chavez totally controls PDVSA and CITGO, as he controls everything else in Venezuela. PDVSA-CITGO is Chavez. Venezuela is all about oil. In other words, Venezuela is a one trick state and that is Chavez's oil. It is now dirty oil. And any who play with Chavez's dirty oil are now known as supporters of Chavez's dirty state.

But having destroyed Venezuela, Chavez and his minions want to corrode U.S. foreign policy and help destroy North American businesses, all part of the North American free trade zone. Chavez seeks to convert/subvert the US democratic republic toward the Chavez-Castro non-democratic state where the courts, police, military, media and government serves the overarching state, controlled by Chavez. They want this for the U.S. and are spending millions to begin the conversion. Although this sounds like a laughable archaic KGB style disinformation campaign, in 2006 it is quite real. These errant souls actually hate the U.S. and all it stands for. Money to Chavez is now being spent on undoing the U.S. and its ethos.

We as people are known by the company we keep. Chavez's company are profiteering pirates who will stoop to any level to profiteer and propagandize their take-over.

The Clinton era disease of enabling the profound rise in illicit activities is enshrined in the infamous `look at what he does, not at what he says' theory about Chavez. This policy has had its day. While ostensibly uttered to inform us that as long as Chavez's tanks were not rumbling down the road, we were to be assuaged that Chavez was no menace. As with all corporate crimes, the victims and the money trail is harder to follow. Tanks were not needed to seize the entire government and monies of Venezuela: Chavez did this with the help of a complicit global foreign policy machinery that stupidly believed that Hugo Chavez was on earth to help the "poor" and other myths. We were urged to look the other way and maintain silence. Such gullibility was understandable but no longer unacceptable. We pay today for the Clinton era theories as if not paid before. We are watching what Chavez says and what he does. And we are tired of paying for this at the gas pump, in wasted lives, and senseless political assassinations. We are weary of our South American friends being spied on by Chavez, having their lives and loved ones ripped apart, and we are quite weary of failed sycophants across the globe telling us that this is all somehow wonderful. It is not wonderful. A dictator is a dictator.

There is no peace with a harpy of instability on the make in the Andean region. While Chavez's crude cacophony distracts attention from the underlying self-enrichment money stashing by his cronies -pathetically robbing his own citizens- his meager piecemeal efforts to ease grinding poverty are random and unsustained, like crumbs from a banquet table, tossed off to the "poor." A blow-hard, screeching, harpy as dictatorships does not seem to be working well for the common man. We are watching what Chavez does and we refuse to listen to his manipulative diatribes and embarrassingly florid speeches. Chavez's routine to cow and control Venezuelans into submission is now affecting the Andean region, particularly Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador. While the screeching Chavez tries to bully confused Latin Americans in to a silent, compliant mass, he is in fact paralyzing what could be vibrant, sustainable quality of life. By un-manning the local leadership, he seeks to control by submission and manipulation. Make no mistake: Hugo Chavez is at the door of these Latin nations and he wants in their beds, so to speak, in their daily lives, with full dominion over their nascent democracies so as to convert their republics to his Bolivarian bloc.

Chavez is not preparing his nation for self-defense. A quick review of his recent weapons spree confirms that Chavez is preparing for regional subversion in the best of cases and invasion in the worse. He is on the move to upend each standing Republic to his own. Who is left to stand with honor against the screeching, manipulative communist caudillo? Where are the local leaders and free press who are not yet cowed into enabling submission or corrupt deal making with Chavez? Who stands with honor to defend liberty, increased education and training, and the backbone of integrity while the Latin American geo-political world is under intense media manipulation, political scams, financial crimes, and their future shatters?

There is only one solution to Hugo Chavez's manipulations: the reinstallation of liberty and integrity given to each man to apply at will. Without this, each nation in South America is lost, soul by soul.

Infrastructure In one of Venezuela's more expensive initiatives at $5 billion total, the government is currently developing projects to create a considerably expanded modern rail transport system for both passengers and cargo. At present Venezuela has only 329 kilometers of railroad, and much of what short length they do have, such as the railroads in Bolívar state, is only available for use to members of the mining industry. Eventually the goal is to bring this number up to 4,000 kilometers of railroad throughout Venezuela, thereby enjoying the advantages of all that modern railways can provide and boosting the country's development. Though the project as a whole will take around 20 years to fully complete, work will start in the coming year with an initial increase to 475 kilometers of rail. This small expansion should allow for the annual mobility of 35 million passengers and 35 million tons of cargo. Specific projects in Venezuela's railroad initiative will include routes from Cúa to Caracas, La Encrucijada to Puerto Cabello and Puerto Cabello to Barquisimeto, among many others.

In addition to the priority being placed on Venezuela's railroads, the highway system is also a priority area for the country in the immediate future. The government will invest $134 million through 2006 in its national road infrastructure investment plan, which will be spent on rehabilitating and building new regional highways. The Inter-American Development Bank will provide the government with the necessary funds to complete the eleven projects in the Venezuelan states of Portuguesa, Apure, Barinas, Falcón and Lara. Guárico state will also receive some needed revamping this year, as Venezuela's infrastructure ministry Minfra will spend $9 million via national urban transportation fund Fontur to refurbish a total of 636 kilometers spread out over 14 roads serving agricultural areas of the state. During the project's first phase, the company elected to perform the works will rehabilitate seven of the 14 sections. The seven stretches, located in regions that primarily produce maize, milk, meat and grain, will total 388 kilometers. Minfra and Fontur will soon be accepting bids on the projects from interested companies.

I think you nailed it.

Chavez is detested by the West, and the likes here, because he brings the subject of "Class Warfare" front and center.

One thinks addressing this issue sooner, rather than later, will only help the greater good by preventing unnecessary bloodshed as Peak Oil unfolds.

One thinks that will never happen in this country because the "elites" would never consider sharing their wealth with anyone.  Just look at Bush's tax policies for proof.

One also thinks that the elites in this country are fools if they believe that all those Gun Aficionados are not capable of hunting Homo Sapiens.  The elites forget that these same folks have been practicing on Deer and Rabbit for decades.

To be fair, the bridge was known to be in trouble for two decades, and it was legal wrangling and corruption that kept it from being fixed.

Chris

There is a lot more to Central and South America politics than money or even class (whatever that might mean) - think race when you hear about elites in South America.

America has nothing to teach South Americans when it comes to racism - and for those who think 'Hispanic' means some sort of all-inclusive concept, do ask a someone who calls themselves Hispanic if they have Indio (or the appropriate local term - probably  translates to 'animal' well enough in practice) parents to get a feel for what I mean.

This is certainly true for the people I have known from Mexico, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Nothing suggests Venezuela is different at all.

Not all politics reduces to economics or class, even in an oil exporter with a world looking at Peak Oil.

Chavez simply being in power is insult enough for that thin strata of Venezuelan society which considers itself better born than all the low life scum around them.

Watch how this plays out in Bolivia - could be quite instructive. And remember - Morales partially won an election by promising not to sell natural gas to outsiders. Something quite interesting is going on in South America, and it has a lot to do with a changing voice for people who had no rights for generation.

Assume:  two mbpd production; one mbpd consumption; production decline of about 25% over a six year period (based on North Sea, which peaked at 52% of Qt); consumption increase of 10% over six year period.  Result:  a 25% production decline equates to a 70% drop in net oil exports.  

As I said before, the net oil export crisis will hit, IMO, before the global oil shortage becomes readily apparent.  

If we look at the past four weeks of 2006 versus the same time frame last year, oil imports are down about 3.6%.  IMO, the markets are sending a price signal right now that the US market needs more light sweet crude oil.  Key point:  we have no idea what percentage of current imports and current inventories represents light sweet versus heavy sour.

My WAG, we will see a worldwide decline in net oil exports of 50% within five to ten years.

By using the Waste by-product "Coke", from Bitumen Processing, to generate Syngas for oil sands production energy. See Opti Canada for a diagram :)

I believe Suncor is doing the same from 2008 onwards.

Other oil sand producers will follow as NG goes up in price

Good letter. Also liked the electric rail link.

Well Done.

Keep us apprised of the reply from the editorial powers that be.

http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/

Feel free to use my letter as a guide for letters to media outlets in your areas.  Rainwater & Pickens make a pretty damn persuasive pair.

Note that the Urban Rail article was written by Alanfrombigeasy.

http://www.energybulletin.net/14606.html

 Open letter to Texas newspapers about peak oil: 'Why aren't you listening?'

Jeffrey J. Brown, GraphOilogy
The US media have two choices regarding the Peak Oil issue. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, you can now have either your honor or the status quo. If you do nothing regarding Peak Oil, you will soon have neither the status quo nor your honor.
published April 4, 2006.