Let's take a look at the news coverage of Venezuela with added comments
Our first article is from USA TODAY
Has Citgo become a political tool for Hugo Chávez?
Posted 1/11/2006
By David J. Lynch, USA TODAY
I haven't reprinted the entire article, but here are a few examples of the reporting with added commentary:
"Yet, there are echoes in Citgo's recent performance of what has transpired elsewhere in Venezuela's oil industry since Chávez was elected in 1998. After a coup in 2002 briefly ousted him from power, Chávez retaliated by purging the state-owned oil company. Thousands of veteran executives and petroleum engineers were cashiered, replaced by those politically loyal to the president's revolutionary aims." (The chronology here is a little gappy, as is the implication that this was a legitimate strike which was broken and then replaced by government cronies. The reality is that some months after the failed coup, the executives, and managers of the company, who were opposed to Chávez, went on an illegal strike. When the workers and government regained control of the company, the strikers were fired. Note, that this was never a strike over working conditions but was instead a political attempt to bring down a democratically elected government. The loss to the Venezuelan government because of the strike, which lasted for many months, is estimated to be close to 10 billion dollars.)
"Throughout the 1990s, Venezuelan oil officials allowed the company's American managers enormous autonomy. "Citgo was an American company. We happened to own it," said Giusti, who headed PDVSA until Chávez took over. "We managed it at arm's length."
That changed under Chávez. In October 2000, the new president tightened control over Citgo by naming as company president a former army general, Oswaldo Contreras. He was the first Venezuelan to hold the position. " (What the article didn't say was that during the time prior to "tightening controls," the company had paid zero dollars in taxes, even though it was a very profitable company. That certainly qualifies as "arms length.")
" In November, two weeks after leading anti-American protests at a hemispheric summit in Argentina, Chávez told a business group in Caracas: "The planet's most serious danger is the government of the United States. ... The people of the United States are being governed by a killer, a genocidal murderer and a madman." The comment followed congressional testimony by a State Department official that labeled Venezuela "a threat to regional stability." (The facts are clear as to who is the leading cause of death and destruction on our planet. I leave it up to you to evaluate this paragraph.)
Giusti, the former PDVSA president, says the current Venezuelan management team is weak. He criticized CEO Rodriguez for lacking substantial international experience and fluency in English. "Felix Rodriguez belongs to a group of engineers who never made it to the top. They only took their positions as a result of being loyal to the revolution of Chávez," he says. (Oil companies all over the world have a long history of denying local workers the opportunity to obtain skills or to manage the refineries and drilling operations. Those positions have traditionally been reserved for Americans, British, and other Europeans who have no real or permanent stake in the local country.)
In an interview, Rodriguez, 56, noted he is a petroleum engineer with 32 years experience. Speaking in heavily accented English, with occasional help from an interpreter, he said he had held a series of planning and supervisory positions, traveled to the North Sea oil fields on "special assignment" and had been vice president of PDVSA before being named Citgo's CEO. (Notice that we didn't learn whether Mr. Guisti spoke spoke Spanish with an accent, or even if he spoke Spanish at all, nor did we learn whether Guisti might also have spoken English with an accent.)
Citgo executives also point to their financial record to rebut suggestions that politics are taking precedence over profits. For the first nine months of 2005, the company reported net income of $419.3 million on revenue of $31 billion compared with $430.3 million in profit on revenue of $23.7 billion for the same period last year. ... At a time when industry-wide profit margins are fat, some competitors have done much better. Industry leader Valero, for example, earned $2.7 billion on $56.3 billion in revenue for the same period. For every sales dollar, Valero earned 4.7 cents in profit. Citgo reaped just 1.3 cents. (What is CITGO thinking! Only a $430 million dollar profit. For shame, when they could be raping the consumers to the same degree as the others! And what about some news of what PDVSA is doing with the government's share of the profits? Not from USA Today but soon you can click here for some information on that.)
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