Posted on 02/05/2006 1:51:34 PM PST by wjersey
Caracas - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez as part of a worsening tit-for-tat diplomatic dispute between Washington and Caracas has said his country could halt all oil deliveries to the United States.
\'It would be easy for us to shut all our refineries in the USA,\' said Chavez in a speech late Saturday to thousands of supporters marking the anniversary of the 1992 coup attempt which he led.
Venezuela is the third-largest oil supplier to the US. All US- bound oil, Chavez said, would instead be diverted to other countries if Washington cuts diplomatic relations with Caracas.
Chavez, a leftist populist whose growing influence in Latin America is viewed warily in Washington, also said he would defy a US veto blocking the sale of Spanish and Brazilian military aircraft to Venezuela by \'buying even more weapons\'.
The already clouded relations between Chavez and the US have worsened following the expulsion last Thursday from Venezuela of John Correa, naval attache at the US embassy in Caracas, on charges of espionage.
The US responded Friday by ordering a senior Venezuelan diplomat in Washington to leave the country, while Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has linked Chavez to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
\'Countries often come to us, wanting to buy our oil,\' Chavez told followers in Caracas. \'Countries like China and India, countries from Europe and also countries from America.\'
\'We would see then how much the price of fuel (in the US) would rise,\' he said, despite adding that he did not wish to reach such an extreme situation.
\'We want to be left in peace. That this imperialistic country once and for all would accept, that Venezuela is not a colony of the US and never will be,\' Chavez told followers in Caracas. Venezuela, according to Chavez, delivers 1.5 million barrels of oil to the US per day.
Citgo, the US subsidiary of the Venezuelan state oil concern Petrobras, has eight refineries and around 14,000 fuel stations in
BOYCOTT CITGO now!
To the people who accepted the Chavez fuel oil bribe, That's what we call "The other shoe".
I warned of this possibility over a year ago.
This is a very serious threat to our nation and one of the primary reasons why President Bush emphasized oil independence in his State of the Union speech last week.
Like most Communists, he is an economic idiot. If he sells oil to other countries, he will simply free up that much oil from elsewhere for us. He will lose income from Venezuela if he does not sell efficiently, but he won't hurt the U.S. one bit.
It's like the misplaced anger of Americans when we were selling most of our North Slope oil to Japan. Japan simply happened to be an efficient customer to ship to from Alaska. What we sold them freed oil up from other sources that the Japanese had previously been buying, which was handier to our ports.
Just words. Oil is fungible. If he sells it into the world market, it hardly matters what its destination is.
Bombs, neutron bombs.
All your oil fields are belong to us.
Remember what happened to Carthage when it tried to raise the price of grain sold to Rome?
;-)
Your point is correct even though your facts aren't. We never sold more than 6% of the daily north slope oil production to Asia.
Yep. And if worse came to worst, we would just buy the same oil from whoever Venezuela sells it to instead of direct.
As they say in Texas: "This guy needs killing"!
look at how the 35-nation board of governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency voted on the resolution to refer Iran to the U.N. Security Council over its nuclear program, which was approved on a 27-3 vote with five abstentions:
YES: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Belgium, Canada, China, Colombia, Ecuador, Egypt, France, Germany, Ghana, Greece, India, Japan, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Sweden, United Kingdom, United States, Yemen
NO: Cuba, Syria, Venezuela
ABSTAINED: Algeria, Belarus, Indonesia, Libya, South Africa
It would be easy for us to seize all your refineries in the USA.
The timing is interesting.
(1) Chavez and Iran get "buddy buddy".
(2) Iran referred to UN Security Council, fears imminent attack from Israel/US/Allies.
(3) Chavez threatens the US oil supply.
Hmmmmm.
i could him doing this when the Iran thing heats up...price of oil would go over 100/br
Still not a full deck.
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