¿Y tu, Evo? : [Willy Sutton Theory of Government ?]

If Willy Sutton were alive today, he’d be eyeing the oil industry. Sutton, you’ll remember, was once asked why he robbed banks. “‘Cause that’s where the money is,” he replied.

According to our sources, Evo Morales may be doing a Willy Sutton number. As candidate for President, he promised the Bolivian peasants a big pay increase. Then, when he got into office, the mean people at the national treasury had a little talk with him. “Where was the money going to come from?” they wanted to know.

Evo looked around. He was losing popularity fast. What did the country have that was worth anything? Coca leaves. Yes, but coca growing is a business best done in the dark of night. If he were to nationalize it, he’d have a revolt from his old friends and supporters - that was the business they were in. And, cocaine is a high-margin business only so long as it remains illegal. That’s just another way the world degenerates, dear reader. The cops and robbers collude to protect the industry.

No, Evo had to find something else. He must have read a paper. Or, maybe he called Hugo Chavez in Venezuela to ask for advice. Maybe he talked to America’s Democrats, who are proposing a “windfall tax” on the oil industry...or the Republicans, who cravenly call for stiff penalties on oil companies convicted of “gouging,” whatever that is. One way or another, he’s found where the money is: energy.

From Moscow to Mecca to Maracaibo...oil and gas revenues are irresistible, and they are changing the shape of the world’s wealth and its politics. We have been writing about the Exodus of wealth and power from the West to the East. Incomes are soaring in India and China. Savings are piling up, and the economic power of Asia will soon surpass that of the United States. But there’s another side to the Exodus. While the U.S. runs a $700 billion trade deficit, an almost-equivalent surplus is being enjoyed by the world’s energy exporters: Russia, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Iran.

And thus, the great American empire - direct heir to the British, lineal descendant of all the great European empires from Athens to Paris - now finds that its major creditors worship other gods, speak incomprehensible languages, dance to tunes they can’t snap their fingers to and generally wouldn’t give a damn if all Western Civilization collapsed in front of them in a heap tomorrow.

We see the evidence of the big Exodus right here in London. Despite the huge salaries paid in the City, London’s answer to Wall Street, a large part of the spending here comes from Russians, Arabs, and other foreigners. By one estimate, the oil exporters together will earn about twice as much free cash this year as the Chinese.

What a change. Even a couple of years ago, the only time you heard Russian speakers in London was when the waiters spoke to each other. Now, it is the customers who are speaking Russian, and the people shopping for luxury apartments or buying Maseratis and Lamborghinis on Brompton Road.

Back in 1998, the Russians were so broke they reneged on a $5 billion loan from the IMF. The crisis that followed sank the world’s most prestigious hedge fund, Long Term Capital Management, and threatened to bring down the whole international financial system with it. Now, Russia earns about $5 billion every week, and just for the month of April, its foreign currency reserves rose $15 billion.

That is the money that is helping - for the moment - to hold up the dollar and the upper end of property markets all over the world.

And so, the Exodus of cash continues...to the product exporters of Asia...and the energy exporters all over the planet. What can Pharaoh do about it? He owes money all over town. His enemies hold a mortgage on his pyramids. He may bluster and threaten, but he depends on them for his daily bread...and to pay his army.

And now, almost in his back yard, Evo Morales thumbs his nose at the U.S. Empire. He says he doesn’t care who owns the companies that pump oil and gas from Bolivian ground; from now on, he’s in charge.

Will ordinary Bolivians be any better off as a result? Of course not, but soon, we predict, Evo’s cronies will be buying condos in Miami.

Nationalizing the hydrocarbons is not just a vagrant notion that suddenly occurred to Morales after he got elected. It's been on his agenda all along - and more particularly to his Vice President Garcia Linero who is the brains behind this Marxist regime.

The fly in their ointment is the location of all the natural gas. It's not in the "altiplano," the mountains where Morales' Aymara and Quechua Indian supporters live. It's in the plains around the city of Santa Cruz, an area inhabited by Guaranis (another people, another language) who dislike Morales. In Santa Cruz he was recently shouted down with cries of "liar" and "thief." The Guaranis have a burgeoning separatist movement and Morales could soon have an insurrection on his hands.

Morales’s nationalization in Bolivia: Who got stabbed?

A large section of the Brazilian press, ex-diplomats, politicians, businessmen and the most right-wing trade union federation, Força Sindical (the opponent of the CUT), used the Bolivian events to criticize the Lula government, accusing it of irresponsibility. The government, they charged, is not defending the enormous national interests of Petrobras in Bolivia.

In fact, the interests of Brazil and its biggest state enterprise in Bolivia are enormous. According to the Brazilian news web site, UOL, the Bolivian affiliate of Petrobras accounts for 24 percent of Bolivia’s tax receipts, 18 percent of its gross domestic product and 20 percent of its foreign direct investment.

Beyond this, it is Petrobras itself that operates 75 percent of the gas exports sent from Bolivia to Brazil, 46 percent of the country’s reserves, 95 percent of its refining capacity and 23 percent of its distribution of derivatives. Moreover, the company produces 100 percent of the gasoline and 60 percent of the diesel fuel consumed in Bolivia. Petrobras’s direct investments in the country between 1994 and 2005 totaled $1.5 billion.

As UOL also points out, Brazil and Bolivia signed a 1991 “Letter of intention of energy integration,” which led to the construction of a bi-national natural gas pipeline between 1997 and 2000, operated by Petrobras, through which fuel is pumped to Brazilian territory. This pipeline has a capacity of 30 million cubic meters a day. The pipeline also operates in neighboring countries: in 2005 it provided an average daily sale of 0.9 million cubic meters of gas to Argentina.

Petrobras is exploring petroleum and natural gas fields in six of the nine Bolivian states (Tarija, Chuquisaca, Cochabamba, Beni, La Paz, and Santa Cruz de La Sierra) and operates the gigantic gas fields of San Antonio and San Alberto, in the south of the country. It was San Alberto that Morales chose as the ideal place to announce his nationalization decree on May 1.

The same source states that the Brazilian corporation’s affiliate, Petrobras Bolívia Refinación S.A. (PBR), operates the two principal Bolivian oil refineries—Gualberto Villaroel in Cochabamba, and Guillermo Elder Bell, in Santa Cruz de la Sierra—and that these two together produce on average 40,000 barrels of oil a day, which were bought by Petrobras for $100 million in 1999. Petrobras also owns 100 of the 400 gasoline stations in Bolivia.

Is it possible, with so many interests in Bolivia, that Petrobras and Lula didn’t know in advance about the measures that Morales was going to take on the 1st of May? Could the “revolutionary” Morales have surprised them? This is just as unbelievable as Lula’s claims that he knew nothing about the corruption in his Workers Party (PT), which existed, above all, in the state firms, among them Petrobras.

With respect to Morales’s nationalization and in the face of the criticisms of the Brazilian government, Lula’s advisor on international affairs, Marco Aurélio Garcia, a university professor with ample knowledge of the history of Latin America, let slip the following statement: “Brazil didn’t get stabbed in the back.”

The obvious question is who then did Morales stab with his nationalization? Did he stab the foreign companies, or rather the Bolivian proletariat itself? After the 180 days have passed, we will know better ~

I would surmise most bank robbers, today, have "bad credit".

It really doesn't matter. The banks will issue cards to anyone. My deceased wife, (7 years) still recieves solicitation. My brother, Bankrupt (1 Year) still recieves solicitation.

I firmly believe, that anyone who can fill out the forms, would recieve a credit card. I firmly beleve that a minimum of on time payments will also get the holder a credit limit in the thousands.

A smart (I know oxymoron) bank robber would simply open a card, take cash advances, use that to pay on time for a small while, use that credit to open other cards, pyramid the the number of open cards, max out the cash advances, and declare bankruptcy.

A little matter of fraud is easier to defend than armed bank robbery.

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