By Manila Ryce
Published Thursday, November 15th, 2007, 9:17 am
Filed under: World: South America, Human Rights, Economic, World Issues, Society/Culture

9 Responses to “Chavez Challenges OPEC to Make Ethical Oil Sales”

1. Chavez is an interesting character and I am always at a loss of what to make of him.

   Part of me thinks he is another megalomaniac and then part of me thinks he is heroic. And being human, he may well be both.

   He does have a point here and he has been very good to the people of the South Bronx, getting them cheap home heating oil.

   Unlike President F*ckwit and company.

   FranIAm
   11/15/07 at 4:36 pm
   

2. You know what? You should hate him. this guy is almost as hateable as those who are telling you hate him. Are you aware of the golpe de estado that he conducted in 1992? He caused the death of more than 100 people. And that’s only the beginning…
   People in venezuela continue to be poor while this BlahBlahMonster continues to talk. He gives oil for free to other countries (even to some US poor neighborhoods.!!!) in order to satisfy his ego. He talks and Talks and TALKS and at the same time he has created 4 million of second class citizens, who are forbidden to work in public institutions or for private companies subcontracted by public institutions. You would think, it’s ok…you can work for the private sector…HA! Everything is getting statized. If you want to get a job you are “invited” to declare formally and legally that someone falsified your signature in the referendum petition from a few years ago. If you do it , they might consider you for the position. If you are hired, they reserve the right to fire you if the Presidente says so on his tv show (I use the word show intentionally, but circus would be ok sometimes).
   Maybe everything looks beautiful for you because you are looking at if from the outside…Go there and spend a year! Do you like milk? Take some because it’s not too easy to find it over there.
   After december he will get able to get reelected indefinitely by changing the constitution for the second time. He has already been there almost a decade! You might notice that my email does not look too real… It’s because regular venezuelans prefer not to talk too much in order to keep our jobs or just to be the less blacklisted possible. For me it’s amazing that some newspapers in the US and Canada still portrait him as a democratic leader and not as what he really is: an elected dictator. Yes, elected by a majority that is violating the most basic rights of the other 40%+ and even their owns. They don’t realize it now but they are giving a person a blank check…He will stays as a president until he dies, like his cuban mentor. Thousands and thousands of venezuelans have already left the country and venezuelans didn’t emigrate a lot in the past. Who is going to vote against him?

   So, hate him as you have been told. The fact that he is against the politicians you don’t like doesn’t make him a good person.

   Another brown venezuelan.

   A Venezuelan
   11/15/07 at 5:21 pm
   
3. 

   @A Venezuelan

   “You might notice that my email does not look too real”

   No, it doesn’t. The rest of your info is also available to me. I won’t divulge it, but other readers should know that you’re not who you say you are, nor are you at where you claim to be.

   Manila Ryce
   11/15/07 at 5:59 pm
   

4. The nonsense of making Chavez a bad guy is what the US is good at. Anyone who sells oil in anything but dollars becauses a hated nation. Chavez tells it like it is. And after the debacle that is Iraq Chavez not only looks right but looks damn intelligent. Its a sad day when gringos try to tell us that Chavez is doing something bad for helping poor people and trying to stop another US war in the Persian Gulf. It tells alot about our society when this type of leader is demonized in the US and other media. Viva Chavez just like Castro he is a great man of principle. Good blogs you are right. I think the fact that he wants peace in Iran and no war also shows that Chavez is great.

   another brown man we are the majority
   11/15/07 at 9:53 pm
   
5. 

   The worst leaders on the planet are now housed in the US. Their policies are all geared toward filling the pockets of corporate cronies, not the empty ones of the ordinary citizen of your vast nation.

   On the other hand, Chavez is a beacon of social conscientiousness; a welcome relief to all those in his nation and surrounding neighbour’ who’ve been victims of dastardly US Foreign Policy for decades.

   Rigid ‘neocon’ dogma has contaminated the minds of your people and they’ll follow the cretinous cabal to the gates of ‘hell’ because they are no longer able to think for themselves. Watch how the right-wing corporate media will play the Barry Bonds issue to darken the focus on truly important issues not only like your dwindled personal ‘liberty and freedom’ but lack of education funding and decent housing for your citizens. America has become a huge dangerous sick joke to the rest of us outside your increasingly fortified borders.

   camelien
   11/16/07 at 6:38 pm
   
6. 

   Actually, I disagree with Chavez about this. I know it’s a fact that industrial society is dependent on Petroleum, but even the wealthiest, most industrial nations are facing a crisis that, within the next decade, will seriously threaten their survival. I’m talking about the dependence on a resource that will be depleted by 2050.

   So I don’t know if getting more Oil to poorer nations, and therefore increasing thier reliance on it, is the best thing in the long run. I mean, sure, heating oil and stuff, all that charity work Venezuela seems to partake in as far as the poor in other countries, that’s all great. But there are, in fact, cheaper energy alternatives to petroleum that I think would benefit poorer countries far more than increased oil supply. Peru and Brazil, for example, have been using Ethanol and Methanol fuels, distilled from agricultural waste, for more than 10 years. Also, Scotland has acquired the genius American engineer who, about 12 years ago, developed the technology to convert Any Organic or Petroleum based waste into fuels. This technology, for some reason, is unwanted in the USA, so it’s about time that Someone’s taking this up. But think about how much garbage poorer nations produce. Thermal Depolymerization can produce Crude out of pretty much anything for $15 a barrel.

   Can Chavez really match this? Can anyone? Perhaps if he’s GIVING it away…

   But then again, why promote international dependence on foreign oil? I mean, isn’t that OUR biggest problem? Doesn’t that make life pretty rough even for us, the richest nation in the world? Isn’t our dependence on the stuff something we really need to change? For anyone who agrees with Chavez, AND answered yes to any of these, please explain how you are for both ideas?
   And besides this, I would go even further to argue that one of the major reasons for many of these countries’ destitution has to do with the world’s dependence on Oil in the first place. Am I off base here?

   PapaFigue
   11/16/07 at 8:10 pm
   

7. The more Chavez gets beat by the MSM and bushco, the more I like him. While not perfect, I’d take him as president in a heartbeat. Especially compared to the chimp.

   moondancer
   11/17/07 at 10:42 am
   

8. PapaFigure

   I will answer your question about how we can be for giving away oil and developing alternatives at the same time at least from my personal perspective. Its called living in the moment with an eye to the future. In the moment right now we have poor people huddling around small space heaters in the winter. We have families found dead from trying to stay warm by heating their homes with charcoal grills because they couldn’t afford heating oil. That is now and that is human life and that is real. Now with an eye to the future, we need to get in place the infrastructure of the alternative fuel sources in order to move away from foreign dependence on oil. However, many of the poorest nations in the world will not be able to have that infrastructure so they will always be dependent on some form of foreign fuel source whether it be oil or an alternative. Chavez is trying to change more than the way oil is sold he is trying to change our way of thinking about economics in general. He is trying to show us a morally correct way of doing business. The only fear that I have is what happens when morally reprehensible people in some of these poor countries take advantage of his generosity and take the oil or any other marketable goods from the people they were intended to help and sell them at market value to the bigger nations and line their own pockets rather than helping their poor. However, I am unwilling to allow that possibility to take away from the good that Chavez is trying to teach us. Oil is the easiest resource to use to teach this lesson with because of our dependence on it. I feel we need to spend our focus on the lesson rather than the tool being used to teach the lesson. Yes we have many issues surrounding oil and its usage but the only reason Chavez is getting any media attention is the fact that it is such a controversial issue. If he was talking about selling wheat, corn, or cotton in an economically unique way that benefited the poor no one would care and his bigger message would be lost. Unfortunately it may be lost in the politics surrounding the use of oil if we do not redirect our perspective to the message as opposed to the tool used to spread the message.

   Miss A
   11/19/07 at 10:11 am
   

9. camelien

   It has become equally frightening to many of us inside the borders but not enough of us to consider an open revolt and unfortunately our elections are controlled by large companies that use their technology to distort the election results to suit their political needs. Many of us that hail from long family lines all the way back to the revolution hate what this country has become however there are not enough of us to make a change. The very fact that when a citizen or leader from another country says the exact same thing that is often said in coffee shops in this country our citizens stand up and defend the very man that they criticize all the time is a disgrace. Yes our current president is an idiot. No, he is not the devil incarnate that would be Dick Cheney our Vice President and he is also the puppeteer that yanks Dubya’s strings. However the mastermind is living in Texas and we did boot him out of the white house a long time ago. He and his cronies spent the next 8 years doing everything in their power to undermine the president including exposing what heaven knows how many other presidents have also done and making a federal case out of sex in the white house just so they could line up their favorite dummy president Dubya. The day I knew for a fact we were in trouble (this was the final straw with me personally) was when Dubya made his infamous comment about the constitution being a GD piece of paper. First of all it isn’t paper but that is beside the point. The point is that he swore to uphold and defend that GD piece of PARCHMENT and instead he is doing the exact opposite at every turn. Some of us hate what our country has become so please don’t stereotype all Americans as blindly following him. I am the mom of three disabled kids. We are poor and there is little I can do to change my country. I fear for my kids future. I welcome anyone that will actually change the way this country is run. I welcome revolutionaries from within whether it is a political or military revolution. I welcome anyone that can make it better. I do know that the only way that is going to happen is when the leaders of this country are subject to the same international laws by which we charge and often convict leaders of smaller nations. When a country the size of the US can wage war on smaller nations and our leaders not be held accountable for that war but a leader of a small nation wages war on their neighbors and are tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for their actions then we have an imbalance of power and that is always going to lead to tyranny over the citizens of the the world.

   Miss A
   11/19/07 at 10:40 am
   

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