By Luis Britto García on March 19, 2022
Wars are fought with oil and for oil. The Glasgow Summit’s story ended in nothing, with its promises of zero CO2 emissions -that is, zero hydrocarbons- by 2050. We are now living through a war promoted to prevent Russia from selling Europe the oil, coal, natural gas and fertilizers it needs to survive, and thus turn Europeans into forced clients of the very expensive, distant and increasingly scarce fracking hydrocarbons of the United States, or those of an OPEC that charges in petrodollars.
An essential instrument of the conflict is a blockade to which, Pepe Escobar opportunely points out, no country in Asia, Africa or Latin America has joined. Escobar also points out that the “blocking” the United States is doing to cannot replace Russian oil, which it relies on. Russia can also freeze 478 billion dollars of its foreign debt by depositing its equivalent in rubles in its own banks; it can mobilize its finances through China’s Mir and Union Pay systems, displacing Visa and Mastercard and provoking a de facto de-dollarization. Let’s add that the Russian Ministry of Energy recognizes that the world’s “peak” of hydrocarbon production has already been exceeded, which will be increasingly valuable, scarce and difficult to extract. This orgy of waste called Development is in decline. Under the most diverse pretexts, wars for the control of fossil energy deposits and the ways to transport them will become more and more frequent and disastrous. Let us prepare ourselves.
Without Venezuela taking any hostile action against the United States, the latter and its accomplices have attacked us in every possible way, including all the varieties of blockade it wields against Russia and threatens to apply against China. Now, on their own initiative, they are reopening communication with us. There are no full authorized reports on the purposes of the Washington mission that met on March 5 in Caracas with Nicolás Maduro Moros, but its very presence says it all. They come before the legitimately elected President, not before the puppet Guiado voted by nobody who for five years has been stealing Venezuela’s assets abroad in complicity with the Americans. There can be no clearer recognition of which is the real government.
To move forward the US must nullify each and every one of the coercive measures imposed by them based on the alleged illegitimacy of the government that it now recognized in fact and in law and they must return all assets stolen or seized since the beginning of the coercive measures and give reparation for all damages caused by them, with compensation for damages to life, health and the economy in an amount that Pasqualina Curcio estimates at US$ 258 billion between 2016 and 2020.
If such are the consequences of de facto and de jure recognition, dialogue with a sovereign government imposes conditions. Its agreements cannot differ from the provisions of the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Any commitments or arrangements detrimental to the sovereignty, independence, integrity or immunity from jurisdiction of our country are unacceptable and null and void. Venezuela is a friend of its friends and an instrument of no one.
When negotiating, the volatility of the agreements with the great powers we must also be taken into account. By virtue of understandings with the United States, Saddam Hussein undertook a ruinous nine-year war against Iran and a lightning offensive against Kuwait, only to end up invaded and executed. Muhammar Kadafi paid compensations sentenced by international courts; he agreed to disarm and financed with generous donations the electoral campaigns of Silvio Berlusconi and Sarkozy, who agreed with false pretexts for the destruction and disintegration of Libya by NATO, the theft of 250 billion dollars of its reserves and the lynching of the legitimate President. Any arrangement with criminals must be accompanied by the internal development of a popular and military deterrent force sufficient to induce them to comply.
We repeat that Venezuela, owner of one fifth of the hydrocarbon reserves of the planet and of the first or second gold reserves of the world, is also a powerful factor in the destinies of the world and under no circumstances should it negotiate from positions of weakness or subordination to any of the hegemonic blocs. Savage capitalism desperately seeks free natural resources in countries that do not charge them taxes and with labor without social or labor rights. That era is over. The World Trade Organization agrees that multinationals must pay at least 15% taxes on their profits to the countries where they are earned.
Venezuela must overcome external threats, but also internal failures. As a hydrocarbon producer, it has experienced booms that degenerated into catastrophes. In 1956, the Suez Canal crisis raised oil prices; the dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez invested the revenues in corruption and “armed concrete policy” of large sumptuary works, until the drop in oil prices contributed to its fall in 1958. The subsequent bipartisanship squandered the income in corruption and demagogy, and was saved by the bell when the restriction of OPEC exports in 1974 pushed a new price rebound. The democratic actionist Carlos Andres Perez applied it to pay for a wasteful nationalization of the oil industry which, according to the law, was supposed to operate free of charge in 1983, and buried the increase of three quarters of the public income in a “Venezuelan Investment Fund”, from where it disappeared thanks to its secret and discretional management, which was shipwrecked in a wave of privatizations. Another part of the boom went to the bottomless pit of the parasitic bourgeoisie: between 1976 and 2002, the Central Bank of Venezuela (BCV) allocated to the private sector $365.27 billion dollars in preferential conditions for supposed imports, which the latter carried out only for US $204.401 million (partly overbilled), keeping the modest difference of US$ 160.869 million.
The price boom caused by the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was applied by Bolivarianism to eliminate illiteracy, fulfill the Millennium Goals and turn Venezuela into the country with the lowest index of social inequality in capitalist Latin America; but neither food sovereignty nor the conditioning of Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. to avoid its accentuated decline in production was achieved. However, according to figures provided by Pasqualina Curcio, between 2003 and 2014 the BCV allocated to the parasitic bourgeoisie under preferential conditions 371,517 million dollars for supposed imports, which the latter realized only for US $119,107 million, keeping for itself the small difference of US$ 329,756 million, (apart from another US$ 60,000 million that, according to President Nicolás Maduro, financed briefcase companies and phantom imports).
According to Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak, oil could soon exceed US$ 300 per barrel. Venezuela cannot repeat the mistakes of previous booms. It must allocate the increased revenues to the regeneration and repowering of Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. It must conquer food sovereignty. It must perfect a strategic deterrent force. By all means avoid the mistake that dissipated all the extraordinary income from the 1974 crisis by placing it in a fund different from the Budget, secret and without legislative control: the nefarious “Venezuelan Investment Fund” which consecutively ruined the country, the Democratic Action party and the politician who created it, Carlos Andrés Pérez. It must establish means of prior, concomitant and subsequent external control of the totality of public expenditure: of the national, state, municipal and communal, autonomous administration, of the foundations, State enterprises and communes, according to the Price Administration Technology system (https://chafefiya.blogspot.com/). It must avoid that the wealth owned by all Venezuelans be again criminally diverted to a parasitic bourgeoisie, as it happened with the infamous Differential Exchange Regime (RECADI) and CADIVI. For those who do not learn from History, as Santayana used to say, are forced to repeat it.
Source: Luis Britto Garcia Blog, translation Resumen Latinoamericano-English