This was diaried yesterday
here but doesn't seem to have gotten a lot of attention. It's now the
2nd story on the CNN page. The story is from the AP.
Thousands of low-income Massachusetts residents will receive discounted home heating oil this winter under an agreement signed Tuesday with Venezuela, whose government is a political adversary of the Bush administration.
Citgo Petroleum Corp., a subsidiary of Venezuela's state-owned oil company, will supply oil at 40 percent below market prices.
It will be distributed by two nonprofit organizations, Citizens Energy Corp. and the Massachusetts Energy Consumers Alliance.
The agreement gives President Hugo Chavez's government standing as a provider of heating assistance to poor U.S. residents at a time when U.S. oil companies have been reluctant to do so and Congress has failed to expand aid in response to rising oil prices.
Isn't this unprecedented? A foreign president, who is considered hostile to the US, filling a gap in US domestic policy?
Chavez proposed offering fuel directly to poor U.S. communities during a visit to Cuba in August.
He has said the aim is to bypass middlemen to reduce costs for the American poor -- a group he argues has been severely neglected by Bush's government.
Chavez has become one of Latin America's most vocal critics of U.S.-style capitalism, which he calls a major cause of poverty.
U.S. officials accuse Chavez of endangering Venezuelan democracy by assuming ever greater powers.
During a short-lived 2002 coup against Chavez, the U.S. government promptly recognized the new leaders, who were soon driven out amid a popular uprising.
It seems to me that what this shows is that US attempts to meddle in Central and South America are no longer able to bring the results that they used to. We do not have the strength as a nation that we once had. Maybe the upside to being engaged in the wars in Afghanistan & Iraq is that it means the US just doesn't have the capacity to conduct its usual strategies, and has been unable to force the governments in this part of the world to accommodate US policy.
I don't think Chavez is such a great guy, really, but the point is that he appears to have been elected in that country, and now he's standing up to the USA, and the US efforts to make him back down have been unsuccessful.
The Chairman & President of Citizens Energy Corporation, which will be distributing the oil in Massachusetts, is Joseph P. Kennedy II.