April 28, 2005
Don't support communism
What you probably know is that Venezuela is inching closer and closer to communism. What you may not know is that Venezuela's state-owned oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A. is the owner of a little company here in the US known as Citgo.
Well, PDVSA has made a bold step embracing communism, this week they moved their corporate headquarters for South America and the Caribbean to Havana. As in Cuba.
Fausta at Bad Hair Blog has the details, including this juicy tidbit:
Venezuela's sending Cuba over 50,000 barrels per day, and that the PDVSA office in Habana will be in charge of commerce, storage, and transport. Venezuela's also opening a branch of the state-owned Banco Industrial de Venezuela in Habana.It doesn't really take a rocket scientist to realize that, since Venezuela's a Caribbean country and already has the necessary infrastructure to carry out all its commercial activity, opening this office and the bank in Havana is simply a means to further merge Venezuela's rapid descent into communism and finance Castro's goverment while avoiding those pesky investigations on corruption scandals and the subsequent calls for financial transparency at PDVSA.
As I mentioned before, Citgo, which has eight refineries and some 13,000 service stations across the U.S., is owned by Petróleos de Venezuela SA. What Venezuela does concerns us directly.
Additionally, Chávez has gone on the record saying that “oil is a geopolitical weapon”.
Read the rest!
Do we really want castro in charge of ANYTHING that has to do with our oil supply? Remember that the majority of our foreign oil imports come from Venezuela.....
Think about that the next time you stop at a Citgo to fill up.... Whose pockets are you really lining?
(h/t: Babalu)
Posted by caltechgirl at April 28, 2005 01:36 PMThanks for the tip. I'm a boycott machine!
Posted by: Paladin at April 28, 2005 04:08 PMThank you Caltechgirl!
Posted by: Fausta at April 28, 2005 06:21 PMCuba is not a bad place. You Right Wing "Christians" think that everyone should have a "Father Knows Best" lifestyle and live the "American Dream". Communism when governed properly helps keep people from doing what Enron did. Without Capitalism, Bush would not be killing innocent people in Iraq. There would have been no slavery in America. There would be no sweatshops. There would be no more street gangs. The Mafia would not exist. Capitalism results in greedy people killing and enslaving people and polluting the environment.
Posted by: Sam at August 4, 2005 04:11 PMYep, there was no greed in Communist Russia, either. No sirree.
Posted by: Mark at August 5, 2005 12:20 AMCommunism when governed properly...Yet oddly enough, in its near century of attempts at governance, communism has never managed to govern properly, or even govern at all. It has only managed to do the two things it inevitably ends up doing best: imposing tyranny on enslaved millions, and piling other millions into gigantic towers of corpses.
As for the rest of your, um, drivel, have you ever read a history book? And understood it? Without moving your lips? Or drooling?
Posted by: Bill Quick at August 5, 2005 12:25 AMYeah, Cuba is great! That's why people are throwing themselves in rubber rafts and desperately trying to get across vast ocean spaces to escape Castro and make it to Evil Bush's empire.
Well, Komrad, why don't you move to Cuba and show us why it's so great? I'll be waiting to hear back from you.
thanks for commenting, you gave me a hearty laugh.
Posted by: DeoDuce at August 5, 2005 12:31 AMSam,
You said: "Communism when governed properly..." Unfortunately, there has not been one place where communism has been governed properly. I challenge you to name even one. Everywhere it has been tried it has failed miserably and resulted in the exploitation of the prolitariat by the ruling class. Can you spell North Korea?
You say: "Capitalism results in greedy people killing and enslaving people and polluting the environment." I say that what you describe is exactly what Lenin, Stalin, Castro, Kim Jong-il, Mao, et.al. did and are doing to their own people. The most polluted countries on Earth are or have recently been Communist.
Nice try, but the next time you read Marx's Communist Manifesto turn on your brain and see that it is the recipie for misery on Earth.
If Cuba is such a great place, why are the people risking life and limb to flock to the good ol' USA where they're not even sure they'll be welcome. And this is the place that persecutes gays and segregates people with HIV from the rest of the population while those not so isolated have one of the lowest standards of living in the Western Hemisphere. But, if Hugo Chavez has his way, his nation's oil notwithstanding, Venezuela may well become as destitute as Cuba.
Posted by: Dan (AKA GayPatriotWest0 at August 5, 2005 01:45 AMMarx is to economics what Bishop Ussher is to science.
Posted by: Kevin Murphy at August 5, 2005 03:23 AM"Cuba is not a bad place"
What bottom-of-the-barrel country are you using as a benchmark? Surely you must live in Camden, N.J.
Posted by: Apiarist at August 5, 2005 08:54 PMCommunism is public slavery. From each... slave labor from everyone. To each... the benefits of slave labor to everyone. In capitalism everyone is their own master, in communism everyone is everyone else's slave. But back when we still had slavery, private slaves were not widely butchered because slaves at least had value as property. In communism, without prices, people have no value and Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and other communists killed their public slaves by the tens of millions. Communism has also been most harmful to the environment because nothing is owned nothing is protected.
Without capitalism, there would be no people.
Posted by: TDM at August 5, 2005 09:55 PMThere would have been no slavery in America. There would be no sweatshops. There would be no more street gangs. The Mafia would not exist.
bahahaha!!! "no slavery" -- the whole population is slaves. "No sweatshops" -- the economy is a seatshop. "no street gangs/Mafia" -- no, indeedy. instead Cubanos call them 'police.'
Look, Sam. I know you're no sharper than a sack of wet mice, but try to comprehend: in a place where one can get thrown in jail and tortured for saying the wrong thing [like "I don't agree with Castro."] or reading the wrong thing or speaking to the wrong person, no one is ever free. Human dignity does not exist.
If you think that is a *good thing,* hire a dominatrix to command your every move for a month or three and see what you might miss. If you turn out to actually like that -- *then* move to Cuba.
Posted by: Claire at August 6, 2005 10:51 PMComment deleted in order to save the commentor from his/her/its own stupidity.--Ed.
Posted by: redzlug at November 7, 2005 05:22 PM
