Venezuela, Once an Oil Giant, Reaches the End of an Era

For the first time in a century, there are no rigs searching for oil in Venezuela.

Wells that once tapped the world’s largest crude reserves are abandoned or left to flare toxic gases that cast an orange glow over depressed oil towns.

Refineries that once processed oil for export are rusting hulks, leaking crude that blackens shorelines and coats the water in an oily sheen.

Fuel shortages have brought the country to a standstill. At gas stations, lines go on for miles.

Venezuela’s colossal oil sector, which shaped the country and the international energy market for a century, has come to a near halt, with production reduced to a trickle by years of gross mismanagement and American sanctions. The collapse is leaving behind a destroyed economy and a devastated environment, and, many analysts say, bringing to an end the era of Venezuela as an energy powerhouse...

Soon after he was elected president in 1998, Mr. Chávez commandeered the country’s respected state oil company for his radical development program. He fired nearly 20,000 oil professionals, nationalized foreign-owned oil assets and allowed allies to plunder the oil revenues...

Sanctions forced the last American oil companies in the country to stop drilling. They may leave the country entirely in December, if the Trump administration ends their exemptions from sanctions...

More than five million Venezuelans, or one in six residents, have fled the country since 2015, creating one of the world’s greatest refugee crises, according to the United Nations. The country now has the highest poverty rate in Latin America, overtaking Haiti this year

OK Yugo can “nationalize” foreign corporations in his country. We shouldn’t go to war to fight for overseas corporation. Lesson learned, eh? Let the corporation fight. $? Good men die on foreign battlefields. Let them collapse under there own systems slaveorations. My last BIG BOX “human resource” person/friend Carrie told me in my 19th year. You’re not an employee. You’re not even and “associate”. You’re considered a “unit of labor”. It was a part-time job for a couple of months short of 20 years. I’ve always worked. I liked to work. I liked to make money. I always took pride in my work. At BIG BOX my mindset walking to the time clock every day was “1. Take care of customers. 2. Get stuff done.”

If I ever felt that I was being treated unfairly, I would go to find employment elsewhere. If I had complaints about a deceiving micro-managing boss, I would take it to his boss. Micro-managing...that was cool too. It would slow me down from my usual pace of getting stuff done.

If I did decide to leave...in my mind it was their loss.

No regrets. I worked. I liked working. I was paid. You learn a lot...from customers. Talk to them.

The NYT finally acknowledges the tragedy. Far too little, far too late, but a grim lesson it is, presented to those who will not listen. Let's take a look at this.

Many of those fired workers fled to Colombia, whose own oil production has soared 6000% since. Here socialist dogma condemned those workers as capitalist oppressors, many of whom weren't even Venezuelan, but all of whom were productive. Their jobs were turned over to more deserving and more to the point, more politically reliable replacements who couldn't produce. Foreign companies who were the victims of theft quite justifiably departed, leaving behind the physical plants but taking with them the vital expertise. And contrary to fond Marxian assumptions, a worker isn't just a worker, they're not interchangeable, and when they can't produce, they can steal. And they did.

But analysts say Venezuelan oil industry is unlikely to attract the level of investment needed for a full recovery.

Well, no, because that turns out to be a little more complicated than simply resurrecting the oil industry. The same pattern of replacing skilled workers with party drones took place in Venezuela's hydroelectric industry, and you need electricity to run extraction and refineries. So with that failing as well the prospect of recovery within the dependent oil industry turns out to be prohibitively expensive, as the Russians found out. The idea of powering it with natural gas turbines locally ran into the difficulty that such equipment had, in fact, already been purchased by the Venezuelan government, unfortunately from the people from whom they'd already expropriated vast amounts of assets, hence were singularly unlikely to deliver. And the Russians didn't want to fund that as well in the face of stupendous corruption within the Venezuelan government that had made some $750 million disappear in one fell swoop. If you're too corrupt even for the Russians to deal with, you're in a real bind, and if, as the Venezuelan government did, you've used oil still in the ground as collateral for loans that similarly disappeared, the Chinese who loaned you the money may just feel a bit put out. It wasn't just politics, it was politics that carried corruption along as a fellow traveler.

The country’s Caribbean coast, a great source of national pride with its turquoise water and white-sand beaches, has been damaged by at least four large oil spills this year — an unprecedented number, according to Venezuelan biologists.

An ugly reality of equipment maintenance is that even storage tanks need it and if they don't get it, they leak. The upshot is that not only can Venezuela not extract the oil, cannot refine it, cannot store it, but they've managed to break their means of shipping it apart from the occasional Iranian tanker that may happen by. They've broken their hydro, they've broken their petroleum, and what is left is pretty much where the country was before about 1920. Socialism did this. Corruption did this. And the people who did this have run out of sugar daddies.

“Ironically, it is actually Socialism/Communism/Marxism that is the ‘opiate of the masses’. It is addictive, and falsely promises so much to ‘the people’ such that they give up their freedoms in order to find ‘utopia’ on Earth.”

Great point, neverevergiveup. Thanks. BIG GOV. Where have we seen that before?

“Ominous Parallels - The end of Freedom in America” - Leonard Peikoff

https://www.amazon.com/Ominous-Parallels-End-Freedom-America/dp/081282850X

Good book. Forgot page of Tom Hayden quote [paraphrase] First we have to start the revolution to see where it goes.

Does that sound familiar Nazi Pelosi?

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