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Like Saddam.

He earned more money in hand via the Sanctions Regime corruption than he would have earned through Iraq openly selling, and accounting for, oil.

The oil cartel economy is not about "grabbing" oil, but suppliers limiting other suppliers in a world with a glut of oil.

Consider that Castro has sold himself off to Iran to keep Chavez in power. Chavez invested former OPEC chief Ali Rodriguez as head of PVDSA, and Venezuela has been extremely vocal about suppressing oil production.

Ask - does it profit Venezuelan officials personally? Well, why wouldn't they do it! Ask also - is the long time tacit support of colombian rebels in East Colombia, where Colombia's oil is, another supply-side market-driven tactic?

It's been going on since the days of the Dutch East India Company, and it's driven by the same people (with some more recent players in on the game).

I am familiar with Amuay.

I always like to remind people that when OPEC announces production cuts, that they are either trying to fake out the other producers while maximizing their own, or else if the cut is real, they are usually covering maintenance problems by making the cut sound voluntary when in fact it is unavoidable.

When the problem is corrected, production drifts back up without any fanfare, the earlier announcements simply forgotten. Venezuela's production is unavoidably down, so they announce that they are cutting production. It is true, but the press always gets cause-and-effect reversed when it comes to OPEC.

These people were fired from the oil company, which means that technically they can't live in company housing anymore. Chavez was evicting them. Technically, he was in the right.

That doesn't change who and what he is.

I was there during his attempted coup in '92, and I remember the attitudes of the people. The professionals were in absolute mourning at the state of their country, I have never seen or felt anything like it. The average folks in the street, however, were lets say incandescent. They wanted the coup to have succeeded.

Venezuela is a country that is like few others. Their memory of military rule is that it was a kind of "Golden Age", when life was grand, crooks were punished, no one littered, people left their doors unlocked, everyone had a job. I can't tell you how many people told me, prior to the coup, that they longed for military rule again.

Consequently, when that crazy little colonel led his disastrous rebellion, the people were behind it 100%. He failed, and got hundreds of his buddies killed, but he became an overnight hero.

I would tell people, you can't be serious, you can't possibly want military rule... but of course they were very serious. But you can vote out the president in two years from now... and they don't allow anyone to serve two terms in a row anyway... Not good enough, they told me, we want him out now. Elections would only give us another just like him.

And life was apparently better under military rule, but no one there notices why. Under the generals, the oil industry was private. There were half a dozen majors operating in the country, investing, building, and consequently there was money sloshing around the country like no where else in Latin America.

But once Democracy took hold, socialism also took hold. They nationalized the oil industry, and it became the government's cash cow, and the economy began to stagnate from that day forward.

Each subsequent government tried to solve the problem by further centralization and socialization of the economy, which means that the economy slowly has drifted downward for decades.

Chavez took power, blaming "neo-liberalism" for the problems of the economy, which was laughable, since the country had really never had a free economy, and especially had not had one since becoming a democracy. So Chavism, really, is solving their economic problems with more of the same. They remember that they were better off under the generals, but they missed the why of it.

Now this guy is driving them into the ground, and he still gets away with blaming the multinationals, and the global system, when the multinationals haven't operated in Venezuela in thirty years. But a significant proportion of the people buy it, and the important thing is that the people who back him are prepared to fight. The majority who now, finally, want him gone want a peaceful solution. And in any fight, the winner is the guy who will fight.

The loser is the guy still waiting for someone else to fight for him.

Ask - does it profit Venezuelan officials personally?

A more penetrating question would be: is it easier for Chavez to get money into his overseas bank accounts by having it deposited by Russia and the rest of OPEC (in exchange for his helping keep prices high) than it is to directly loot Venezuela's oil industry?