Posted on 11/20/2005 5:31:04 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
A subsidiary of the Venezuelan national oil company will ship 12 million gallons of discounted home-heating oil to local charities and 45,000 low-income families in Massachusetts next month under a deal arranged by US Representative William D. Delahunt, a local nonprofit energy corporation, and Venezuela's president, White House critic Hugo Chávez.
The approximately $9 million deal will bring nine million gallons of oil to families and three million gallons to institutions that serve the poor, such as homeless shelters, said officials from Citizens Energy Corp., which is signing the contract. Families would pay about $276 for a 200-gallon shipment, a savings of about $184 and enough to last about three weeks.
The contract is to be signed Tuesday by officials from Citizens Energy, based in Boston, and CITGO, a Houston-based subsidiary of Petróleos de Venezuela SA. The contract was arranged after months of talks between Delahunt, a Quincy Democrat active in Latin American affairs, and Chávez, a leftist former paratrooper and fierce critic of the Bush administration.
''We recognized that we had an opportunity," Delahunt's spokesman, Steve Schwadron, said yesterday.
Chávez showed ''an inclination to do a humanitarian distribution" of oil, and poor families in Massachusetts had a ''desperate need" for relief from high home-heating prices, Schwadron said. He characterized the deal as one between ''a US company and two nonprofits to help them do more of what they already do, with terms that mean the price is good."
Delahunt was not available for comment yesterday.
Schwadron said the congressman did not get involved in the details of the contract, but had raised the issue with Chávez and helped connect the nonprofits with CITGO, which is owned by PDV America Inc., an indirect, wholly owned subsidiary of Petróleos de Venezuela SA, the national oil company of Venezuela.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
> As usual they're buying votes ...
Looks more like Hugo's bought himself a congressman. When clinton installed Aristide, the Kennedys got control of Haitian telecom. A friend from Barbados told me much the same happened there. Lating America and the Caribbean are going to get more and more "interesting." Chavez is building himself an extraordinary powerbase, while in return, the mob has cocaine and the Dems have the rest...oil, telecom, shipping.
1. It is the envirowhackos who have prevented the construction of refineries for more than two decades by filing frivolous suits on behalf of spotted owls and 3-legged-toads...suits that are rubber-stamped by Carter and Clinton judicial appointees.
2. The oil industry is in the business to make money. Capitalism. That being said, prices at the pumps for more than 3/4 of U.S. gas stations are set at each station not by giant conglomerates. This is because of antitrust laws. And such prices wouldn't be so high if federal and state governments didn't tax the hell out of liquid fuels. Granted home heating oil isn't taxed the same...but the government still takes its share.
3. People freezing to death? Parade of imaginary horribles without a scintilla of evidence to back it up. Give me a break. You sound like every leftist troll who posts here. Can't wait to hear your views on homelessness, Kyoto Treaty, and the Iraq War.
P.S. Give my regards to Comrade Sheehan during your next protest.
Piffle. Heating oil stocks are very high, and there are already programs to get heating oil to the needy.
I've heard all the arguments about democrats keeping a refinery out of the Northeast but that's just oil company/administration spin.
Piffle again. It isn't about local refineries. Oil products can be and are shipped from one side of the country to the other, and one side of the world to the other, when an order is placed. Lack of refineries will not affect the oil coming from Venezuela, for instance.
Home heating oil is nothing more than regular diesel oil, usually #2, though sometimes it has a different mix of additives. If you look at the price at your local gas station, you will see that the cost is higher than gasoline there, as well.
Hmmm, sounds like you favor big government to regulate prices. That's certainly not a conservative issue. I'm not surprised, you are a lawyer after all. Your screed belongs over on DU.
" Piffle. Heating oil stocks are very high, and there are already programs to get heating oil to the needy."
Stocks are down from last year and the programs to get oil to the poor are virtually all run by the states with federal funds on a voucher system. The amount of money available this year is exactly what it was last year when the price of home heating oil was substantially lower than it is now.
"Piffle again. It isn't about local refineries. Oil products can be and are shipped from one side of the country to the other, and one side of the world to the other, when an order is placed. Lack of refineries will not affect the oil coming from Venezuela, for instance."
Precisely, but the oil companies/administration line is that the problem in this country lies in a lack of refining capacity, not crude supply.
"Home heating oil is nothing more than regular diesel oil, usually #2, though sometimes it has a different mix of additives. If you look at the price at your local gas station, you will see that the cost is higher than gasoline there, as well."
Over the road diesel is taxed just like gasoline. Home heating oil isn't.
So the SOROS funded publicans MAYBE had reason to stop ANWAR.
Your creditability isn't going to improve by repeating the BS that appears in the Boston Plop, NYT and spews forth from Kennedy's gang of limousine-socialists.
Rest assured there is PLENTY of oil and money to pay for it. If there were any REAL concern, the government could just cut its extortionate taxes on oil and gasoline which amount to around 3 times the oil company profit per gallon. The government gets its rakeoff without doing ANYTHING constructive toward finding, drilling for, refining, or distributing the product.
The economic ignorance of MASSholes and liberal moonbats would be unbelievable if it weren't so prominently and frequently demonstrated.
". The oil industry is in the business to make money. Capitalism. That being said, prices at the pumps for more than 3/4 of U.S. gas stations are set at each station not by giant conglomerates. This is because of antitrust laws. And such prices wouldn't be so high if federal and state governments didn't tax the hell out of liquid fuels. Granted home heating oil isn't taxed the same...but the government still takes its share."
The price at the pump is indeed usually set by the local retailer, though by no means always. Their margins run anywhere from 5 to 24 cents per gallon, gross. Its a business of pennies, my friend. The refiners control the rack price, and the dealers and jobbers pay based, usually, on that. A simple tactic like putting out the word that there will be allocations of "unbranded" product because of an anticipated shortage will, and did, cause an unbranded/branded rack price inversion which drove up the price of unbranded to both jobbers and retailers. That in turn drove up the price of branded product on account of the traditional premium paid for "branded" product. The companies then used the fantasy shortage of gasoline product to excuse the jump in home heating oil prices. The companies made vast sums of money. But you know what, there was no shortage and no plans for an allocation. Now, if that's your idea of how capitalism ought to work, I think you'll find that as a society we decided about 100 years ago that that wasn't such a good idea.
"You sound like every leftist troll who posts here."
Oh, I think my bona fides as something other than a leftist troll have been petty well established here, my friend.
Of course the Dems are buying votes. This is outrageous.
They are literally selling out freedom for oil.
"Your creditability isn't going to improve by repeating the BS that appears in the Boston Plop, NYT and spews forth from Kennedy's gang of limousine-socialists."
Actually, I read the Herald! :)
"Of course the Dems are buying votes."
The Republicans would never do that, would they? I seem to remember something about a bridge up in Alaska, but I am getting older, maybe I'm wrong. Then there's that "immigration reform" we've all heard of from the administration. Money for votes???!!! My friend, that's what politicians do and it makes little difference whether they are Rs or Ds.
I think it's time to start squeezing Massachusetts
.....and that still will not cause anybody to freeze because they couldn't get any heating oil. There is plenty of fuel and charity money to go around.
....the oil companies/administration line is that the problem in this country lies in a lack of refining capacity, not crude supply.
That is everybodies line, if they are talking about problems caused by a refinery or two being shut down. However, your argument was about the "line" about refineries in the N.E., not worldwide.
Farm-use fuels do not pay road taxes either, and diesel is still usually more expensive than gasoline. Home heating oil is taxed, although politicians don't like to admit it.
This is bigger than the Oil for Food scandal.
Democrats are selling American freedom for oil.
Congress invited this response when it cut funding for LIHEAP (heating oil assistance for poor people) while shoveling money into useless Alaskan bridges. We have people here who could barely afford to heat their homes last year who have since seen prices nearly double, and the aid that they received has been cut. Someone's willing to help, that makes him the sucker.
In the meantime, the southerners in Congress are thrilled to tap our northern tax money for their own farm subsidies ratholes.
And don't bother bringing up the Big Dig--Massachusetts has ALWAYS paid more to Washington than we've gotten back, even during the worst days of Tip O'Neill, when at best we came within a hair of breaking evem. Now we get back about 75 cents for every dollar we send to Washington and then on to West Virginia, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Alaska...
Boycot CITGO!!!
Look at the Lewinsky the Glob gives to Chavez, "a leftist former paratrooper and fierce critic of the Bush administration". "Communist expropriator and Yet Another Tinhorn Despot" would be more honest.
Delahunt, meanwhile, is proving himself to be the George Galloway of the Western Hemisphere. "Blood for Oil", indeed.
We need no further proof that the Joe The Second and the rest of the baby-boom generation of the Kennedy Kleptocracy is the same bunch of vapid bolsheviks they've always been. "Citizen's Energy", my hemorrhaging wallet. Every "non-profit" that competes with an actual business is, of course, a tax-subsidized government boondoggle in disguise, actually *raising* the price of any product in a given market by *killing* honest businesses in the long run.
And, of course, the usual "public interest" tax-vampires are quoted as if they were spouting gospel through all orifices on judgment day.
A *fine* thing to wake up to on a Sunday morning...
I see you're from North Carolina. Pop quiz: which of these states committed treason against the United States and engaged in unconstitutional rebellion:
1) Massachusetts
2) North Carolina
Why do we buy gas from CITGO?
Buy American.
On balance though, this deal speaks volumes for Chavez' true feelings when it comes to free trade - he obviously favors it. So all his public appearances amount to posturing as his new slogan becomes, "Show me the money!"
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