Only 20% of Venezuelan oil money goes to the state. 80% disappears. In 1974 it was the reverse.

national | miscellaneous | news report Thursday December 26, 2002 20:55 by eco man - corporatism.tripod.com

Why the coup-plotters are in such a hurry.

The corporate media and the corporate coup plotters want to overthrow the elected government to prevent the January 2003 implementation of economic legislation that will change things for the better. Please forward widely. I have not seen these 2 facts anywhere else in the world's English media. This is the reason for the continual coup attempts this year in Venezuela.

Today only 20% of Venezuelan oil money goes to the state. 80% disappears. In 1974 80% went to the state.

Bold formatting has been added to some of the text below. The last 2 articles below detail progressive changes that have occurred in Venezuela for the poor and others.

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http://www.narconews.com/Issue26/article556.html

The Narco News Bulletin

narconews.com - Reporting on the Drug War and Democracy from Latin America Home | Mailing List | Search | Print

Why Are the Coup Plotters So Impatient?
…And How Venezuela Can Defeat Them Legally

By Heinz Dieterich Steffan
Rebelion.org
December 8, 2002
[Snip. Excerpt from article:]

The second reason for the pro-coup haste is the entrance in vigor of various important laws that come into effect on January 1, 2003, that touch vital interests of the economic elite: Among them, the Land Law that affects not just the large plantation owners in the country but also real estate speculators and vacant lots in urban zones. The Hydrocarbon law is even more important because it will permit the dismantling of the meta-State of the petroleum business PdVSA, the corrupt oil group that controls the economic life of the country and that is an integral part of the New World Energy Order of George Bush.

Today, only 20 percent of the income of this mega-company goes to the State. Eighty percent goes to “operating costs” that enrich secret accounts of the beneficiaries of this economic cancer. The power of this petroleum “steal-ocracy” has become propped up progressively during recent decades. In 1974, the company delivered 80 percent of its income to the State and kept 20 percent (“operating costs”). In 1990, the ratio tied at 50 to 50 percent and in 1998 it reached the ratio of 80 to 20 percent. It’s logical that they are going to fight to the death – of the nation – to defend “their” black gold.

Today, only 20 percent of the income of this mega-company goes to the State. Eighty percent goes to “operating costs” that enrich secret accounts of the beneficiaries of this economic cancer
[Snip. end of excerpt]

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From vheadline.com December 22 2002.
External link to this page at URL:
http://www.vheadline.com/0212/14349.asp



Former PDVSA director confirms past poor performance

Former Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) board director Carlos Mendoza Potella has confirmed a last Sunday Ultimas Noticias report about PDVSA’s poor performance compared to other countries based on an America Economia magazine report “iIt shows the company has been run with little interest in Venezuela."

In 1976 PDVSA received $9 billion for all its operations and handed $7 million to the Treasury whereas in 1995 income reached its highest at 27.261 billion and the treasury receive $4.9 billion.

[snip. End of excerpt]

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The Narco News Bulletin
Christmas Comes Early in Caracas, Venezuela
Chronology of the Strike that Wasn’t

By Al Giordano
December 22, 2002

Mid-December:
The Oil Sector Sabotage
http://www.narconews.com/Issue26/article571.html

[snip. Excerpt begins]

There was, this month, one sector of oil company executives that claimed they were on “strike,” but who in fact have spent this month actively working to lock-out rank-and-file employees and, according to their own public statements, to facilitate the sabotage, including eco-terrorism, of oil facilities.

According to public records at the Venezuela Secretary of Mining and Energy (MEM, in its Spanish initials), these were the annual salaries of the 22 major oil “strike” leaders, including their bonuses, paid vacations, and other benefits, at the trough of the state-owned oil company, Petroleum of Venezuela, or PdVSA:

Edgar Paredes makes 837 million bolivars a year ($643,000 U.S. dollars).

The lowest paid of these 22 ringleaders, Luis Ramírez, makes 310 million bolivars a year ($238,000 U.S. dollars).

The highest paid, Karl Mazeika, makes 990 million bolivars a year ($761,000).

The average annual salary of these 22 “strike” leaders is $426,000 U.S. dollars a year; almost 100 times the per capita income of the average Venezuelan citizen of $4,760 dollars per year. In the Venezuelan economy, $426,000 gives somebody more buying power than people who make millions of dollars a year in the United States.

Check out the rest of their salaries in the Venezuelan currency of Bolivars (at 1,300 bolivars to the dollar), here they are, the annual booties of the oppressed “vanguard” of The Strike That Wasn’t:

Luis Andrés Rojas: 688 million
Vincenzo Paglione: 979 million
Raúl Alemán: 687 million
Horacio Medina: 320 million
Juan Fernández: 399 million
Edgar Rasquin: 668 million
Rogelio Lozada: 410 million
Luis Matheus: 533 million
Carlos Machado: 542 million
Iván Crespo: 498 million
Luis Aray: 530 million
Andrés Riera: 508 million
Maria Lizardo: 444 million
Armando Izquierdo: 501 million
Luis Pacheco: 542 million
Gabriel García: 322 million
Francisco Bustillos: 643 million
Salvador Arrieta: 596 million
Armando Acosta: 471 million

Each of these oil executives, of course, had their own team of highly-paid middle managers underneath them: controlling the paperwork, the computers, the hiring and firing, and all other aspects of the company.

In recent weeks, they locked out the workers, and installed their own men at key strategic points where sabotage has been committed to facilities under their watch.

The “opposition” complains about graffiti on the wall of a Commercial TV station and calls it “vandalism” or “violence.” These guys, meanwhile, have presided over the destruction of pumps, pipelines, tankers and other ships, trucks, and other key points in the flow of oil from the ground to the consumer, including to the United States.

If they had tried anything like this inside the United States, we would see the White House calling them terrorists, locking them up in Guantanamo Bay, and suing them for the millions of dollars of losses that they have caused. Some of the members of the “oil-igarchy” have made public statements that some oil supplies have been contaminated, and some facilities have been booby-trapped to cause environmental disaster if they are re-started.

Between the oil drilling facility and the gas pump there are many stops along the road. Shut down or sabotage one of those points, and you shut down the entire pipeline. That has certainly happened at various points. But to hear the U.S. and British press correspondents, the language of distortion always uses these events to claim that there is somehow universal compliance with the strike at every point in the pipeline. That is not the case, nor has it been the case at any point during December 2002.

As the government is now firing these petrol-terrorists and retaking tankers and other facilities, it has had to bring in licensed foreign inspectors to make sure that environmental disaster doesn’t occur once the facilities are inevitably re-started, and to make sure that the oil that is sent to the U.S. and elsewhere meets safety and quality standards. Thus, the delays and the shortages in certain regions: but none of the true facts reveal anything close to a “strike” or “work stoppage” by the eco-terrorists who claimed to be rank-and-file oil workers.

Even with so much sabotage, five tankers have already left for the United States with crude oil. Hundreds of tanker-trucks have been shipping gasoline to service stations all over Venezuela.

It’s going to take a few more weeks to restore the situation to normal; that will happen sometime in early 2003.

But what is unforgivable by the U.S. and British correspondents, like the corrupt Commercial Media in Venezuela, is how they abused the facts of these delays, withheld the true reasons for them from the readers, to create the false impression that there was a “strike” (when there was nor is none), that it was “growing” (when it was not), and that the problems “increased” (when they did not) for the democratically elected government.

When the final history is written of December 2002, it will be known as the month that the Venezuelan democracy took its oil industry back from a clique of over-paid and corrupt coup-plotters after the executives tried to sabotage it. (Just as April 2002 is now remembered as the month that the people brought the Armed Forces back under democratic control; a fact that is underscored by the events of December, in which the military, now purged of most of its “School of the Americas” trained terrorists from previous administrations, has behaved in an exemplary manner.)

To repeat: In April, the problem of military coup was solved by a creative popular movement and its democratically elected leaders; in December, the last gasp of elitist control of a nation’s oil has played itself out and the petrol-terrorists have been sent packing.

Also in December 2002, for the first time in history, the nations of the entire hemisphere stood up to the United States executive branch through the Organization of American States Permanent Council. There were still games being played by the OAS secretary general Cesar Gaviria and by the White House in continued efforts to destabilize democracy in Venezuela, but they now have much less maneuvering room today than they had a month ago or ever before. As reported: Gaviria has already run from the scene of the crime. And come January, with Brazil and Ecuador inaugurating popular presidents smart and savvy enough to stand up to foreign intervention, this is already not Bush’s father’s América.

This is history in the making. In the middle of the simulated “War on Terrorism” and its Twin Tower, the “War on Drugs,” being used by cynical Power to get its way on every front, a grassroots democracy movement in Venezuela, related to similar movements throughout our América, has beaten the empire’s advances.

[snip. End of excerpt]

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ZNet | A Community of People Committed to Social Change

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=45&ItemID=2546

Why Venezuela's Middle Class (for the most part) Opposes Chavez

by Gregory Wilpert
October 27, 2002

VENEZUELA

[First part of article snipped]

The government's health care and education policies have benefited the poor more than the middle class because the middle class tends to rely on private health care and education. In contrast, the poor have benefited from the institution of universal health care for the first time in Venezuela's history, even if that health care is relatively miserable, at least it is more accessible to the poor than it has ever been. The situation is similar with education. The government has introduced thousands of "Bolivarian" schools throughout the country, which provide three free full meals per day to all students; something they would never be guaranteed if they stayed at home. As a result, one million new students have been matriculated in schools, who were never part of the school system before.

One of the most significant achievements of the new constitution is that it permanently broke the two-party system of Venezuela and has thus enabled the participation of large sectors of society that were traditionally excluded from government before. Important in this regard are the constitution's inclusion of women, indigenous peoples, and homosexuals, who in the earlier constitution had few real rights. Again, these are changes that, at best, the vast majority of the middle class feels quite indifferent about.

Another area that is high on the Chavez government's agenda, but which leaves the middle class out, is land reform. The government has introduced two kinds of land reform programs-rural and urban. The rural land reform has caught quite a bit of attention and its passage in November 2001 was arguably the beginning of the opposition's campaign against the president. The land reform law is essentially designed to put idle land into production and to redistribute idle land to landless peasants if landowners refuse to put their land into production. The basic purpose is to both create greater social justice and to increase the country's agricultural production. This program is also supplemented by a wide variety of agricultural credit and training programs.

The urban land reform program, in contrast, is designed to confer ownership titles to land which the urban poor currently occupy illegally through land invasions and to help them improve their communities through self-governance. The urban reform program sets up land committees of up to 200 families in the poor neighborhoods that help measure plots of land, determine communal property, negotiate with government for services such as water and electricity, and create a communal identity. This democratization of property is to be combined with a democratization of local governance through participatory planning processes for local projects, such as has been spearheaded in parts of Brazil under the Labor Party there.

Other major government programs that primarily benefit the poor, but not the middle class are the public housing program and the micro-credit programs. Related to this, the government recently announced the creation of a new "Social Economy" ministry. This ministry would support workplace democracy, especially the creation of cooperatives and other social justice projects, such as the micro-credit programs.

A policy that directly hurts the interests especially of the upper middle class is the government's effort to collect income taxes for the first time in Venezuelan history. Only those with incomes in the top 20% or so are required to pay income taxes.

[Rest of article snipped]

Gregory Wilpert is a freelance journalist and sociologist, who lives in Caracas and is currently working on a book on Venezuela during the Chavez presidency, which will be published by Zed Books in 2003. He can be reached at: Wilpert@cantv.net

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Women and the new Bolivarian Constitution of Venezuela. 72% of men and women voted FOR it. Many details on the progressive aspects of the new constitution and how it effects women and others. Message at Ireland Indymedia:
http://indymedia.ie/cgi-bin/newswire.cgi?id=22333&start=0

“We women reject the organizers of hate and chaos.

"We women are on the front line for our right to live in peace and to defend the Bolivarian Constitution of Venezuela, which gives us, for the first time in history, the right to full legal equality, to social security, to a pension for housewives. We are on the streets backing our President and our Bolivarian Revolution.

"Long live the Constitution! No to the fraudulent referendum! No to the pro-coup fascist stoppage! Don’t stop for the stoppage!”

----Go to the link above for many more details.--------

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