Posted on 04/27/2006 3:33:36 PM PDT by freemarket_kenshepherd
As first-quarter earnings reports gush in to newsrooms, the media are again portraying stockholder-owned American oil companies in a sinister light while ignoring or downplaying socialist oil barons like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.
While ABC’s April 26 “World News Tonight” opened with an attack on the success of petroleum companies – anchor Elizabeth Vargas noted “overflowing profits for the oil industry as Americans struggle to pay rising prices at the pump” – it also featured a story that just briefly discussed how Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez is pumping some of his billions in oil money into undermining American interests.
The same night on the “CBS Evening News,” correspondent Byron Pitts slammed American petroleum companies as harming consumers and even their own gas station owners, though the Citgo station owner he featured worked for a company owned by Venezuela.
Over on ABC, correspondent Dan Harris was more realistic. “Before you get too steamed at the oil companies, take a hard look at oil-producing countries such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Venezuela,” Harris said.
“It’s the producers,” of oil, countries like Chavez’s Venezuela, “that make the lion’s share of the profit,” Thompson Financial research director Michael Thompson told ABC News.
(Excerpt) Read more at freemarketproject.org ...
Whatever "big oil's" profit, averaging $0.09/gal, the big federal government taxing bureaucracy took twice that, roughly $0.18/gal, while having "big oil" (as well as everybody else) do most of the accounting, always under threat of criminal charges.
State and local governments have been taking another $0.30/gal!
Them thar revenuers deserve to take less than those who've invested their own sweat, blood, time and livelihoods to make it a business, in bad times as well as good.
HF
in the cbs hallway isn't president chavez's portrait hanging on the wall, in between billy boys and monica's?
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