Chavez vs. Big Oil

The New York Times reports on the clash of some of the most repellent titans in the world, and I don’t know where I stand. I somehow doubt that Chavez’s program would be quite so radical if the Bush Administration hadn’t idiotically offered its tacit support to the 2002 coup attempt, but it did and today we have another regional agitator to deal with.

New refinement technology has the potential to make Venezuela’s “dirty” crude oil reserves as valuable as the Saudis’, and naturally the petroleum giants are willing to tolerate any rabble-rouser if they can just get a piece of the action. Chavez dreams big, though, and Caracas and Houston are having trouble seeing eye to eye:

Consider the quandary facing Exxon Mobil after its chairman, Rex W. Tillerson, recently suggested that Exxon might be forced to abandon a major Venezuelan oil project because of its growing troubles with Mr. Chávez.

The energy world took notice. So did Mr. Chávez’s government.

Only a day later, Venezuelan agents raided Exxon’s offices here in the San Ignacio towers, a bastion for this country’s business elite. The government said that the raid was part of a tax investigation, but energy analysts said the exchange of threat and counterthreat was all too clear.

Boys will be boys.

There’s a reason to support Exxon and Chevron in all this, and strangely enough it has to do with the survival of the remaining threads of democracy in Venezuela. The Middle Eastern oil dictators defend their despotism by pointing out that state oil companies pay for the entire government apparatus – no representation without taxation, they say. Better to keep U.S. oil companies in place than to abandon the country to Chavez’s proletarian thug state indefinitely, no?

Speaking of oil states, what have you read about Sao Tome and Principe lately? Give a country a leadership that hasn’t made a career of trying to kill its problems, and there’s a possibility that even a tiny, impoverished African island state can transform itself into a free and prosperous society.