Venezuela could help Del.'s poor stay warm

Venezuela could help Del.'s poor stay
lawyer working on deal for discounted


Venezuela's national oil company, Citgo Petroleum Co., could send up to 750,000 gallons of home heating oil to Delaware at a 40 percent discount.
By MIKE CHALMERS
The News Journal
12/24/2005
Citgo Petroleum Co., Venezuela's national oil company, could send as much as 750,000 gallons of discounted heating oil to low-income Delaware families this winter under a plan being developed by Venezuelan Ambassador Bernardo Alvarez and Richard Korn, a Hockessin lawyer.

"There are details that still need to be worked out, but it's definite that Delaware is in the program," Korn said. "The oil isn't going to flow tomorrow, but this is going to bring the countries closer together."

In October, Korn and his wife, Magda, hosted Alvarez's two-day visit to Delaware, which included a stop at the Latin American Community Center in Wilmington. There, Alvarez met several low-income families, and he asked many questions about their heating bills.

A month later, Citgo announced it would provide 12 million gallons of discounted heating oil to low-income families in Boston and 8 million gallons to families in New York City.
(snip/...)

http://www.delawareonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051224/NEWS/512240305/1006

of the money they got for charging usuary rates to help the poor and forgotten in Delaware would we.

Venezuela gives Exxon ultimatum

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4544390.stm

in the sense that it helps America. Exxon is about Exxon. They cheat Americans just as much as they cheat anyone else. The oil companies have been ripping off third-world countries since oil was first discovered. Kudos to Chavez for sticking it to them, even if he is going about it the wrong way (debatable).

Exxon negotiated their deal with Amazon years ago with a corrupt Venezuelan gov't more interested in lining their pockets and foreign oil execs' pockets than they were in making Venezuela into a society that works properly.

Have you seen Syriana?

"Chavez is taking back Venezuelan oil assets from Exxon."

I don't care for Exxon-Mobile or any other exploitive corporation, let them eat cake, and enjoy it too!

since that oil is on Venezuelan territory.

Fuck those Valdez monster pricks.

Give me a break, you make me laugh!!!!

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

to appease his rw critics. Clinton allowed old growth forest logging for over two years before we were able to bring a halt to it.

when such a high percentage of his own population is living in abject poverty.

health care etc for his countries.

He's moving his own country in the right direction so resolutely and on such a good pace that he's can concern himself with showing class loyalty to the impoverished all over the globe. And he picked a good place to direct his efforts, since we're moving rapidly in the opposite direction.

Anyway, don't you know, we're all better off when we're all better off. American working people aren't better off when there are poor people in other countries. And venezuelans moving up aren't better off when there are Americans moving down.

Chavez should be as concerned with the potential for disruptive, chaotic "two Americas" as Americans should have been concerned all these years with oligopolists (supported by America) ruining countries around the globe since the Eisenhower administration. And we should all celebrate progressive governments everywhere willing to promote progressive values everywhere.

Well stated.

I doubt the Chavez haters will "get it" but I apreciate you trying:-)

Venezuela still makes a profit on the oil and fuel that it sells cheap to the US poor, and much of that profit is spend on the poor in Venezuela.

Osmosis??

No!

Plutocratic assholes of which Chavez is NOT one.

Damn...

In using oil wealth to help the poor, Venezuela's leader is an example to Latin America

Richard Gott in Caracas
Monday May 30, 2005

~~ snip ~~
Hundreds of similar shanty towns surround Caracas, and many have already begun to turn the corner. In some places, the doctors brought in from Cuba are working in newly built premises, providing eye treatment and dentistry as well as medicines. Nearly 20,000 doctors are now spread around this country of 25 million people. New supermarkets have sprung up where food, much of it home-produced, is available at subsidised prices. Classrooms have been built where school dropouts are corralled back into study. Yet it is good to start with the difficulties faced by the motorway village, since its plight serves to emphasise how long and difficult is the road ahead. "Making poverty history" in Venezuela is not a simple matter of making money available; it involves a revolutionary process of destroying ancient institutions that stand in the way of progress, and creating new ones responsive to popular demands.

Something amazing has been taking place in Latin America in recent years that deserves wider attention than the continent has been accustomed to attract. The chrysalis of the Venezuelan revolution led by Chávez, often attacked and derided as the incoherent vision of an authoritarian leader, has finally emerged as a resplendent butterfly whose image and example will radiate for decades to come.

Most of the reports about this revolution over the past six years, at home and abroad, have been uniquely hostile, heavily influenced by politicians and journalists associated with the opposition. It is as if news of the French or the Russian revolutions had been supplied solely by the courtiers of the king and the tsar. These criticisms have been echoed by senior US figures, from the president downwards, creating a negative framework within which the revolution has inevitably been viewed. At best, Chávez is seen as outdated and populist. At worst, he is considered a military dictator in the making.

Yet the wheel of history rolls on, and the atmosphere in Venezuela has changed dramatically since last year when Chávez won yet another overwhelming victory at the polls. The once triumphalist opposition has retired bruised to its tent, wounded perhaps mortally by the outcome of the referendum on Chávez's presidency that it called for and then resoundingly lost. The viciously hostile media has calmed down, and those who don't like Chávez have abandoned their hopes of his immediate overthrow. No one is any doubt that he will win next year's presidential election.

The Chávez government, for its part, has forged ahead with various spectacular social projects, assisted by the huge jump in oil prices, from $10 to $50 a barrel over the past six years. Instead of gushing into the coffers of the already wealthy, the oil pipelines have been picked up and directed into the shanty towns, funding health, education and cheap food. Foreign leaders from Spain and Brazil, Chile and Cuba, have come on pilgrimage to Caracas to establish links with the man now perceived as the leader of new emerging forces in Latin America, with popularity ratings to match. This extensive external support has stymied the plans of the US government to rally the countries of Latin America against Venezuela. They are not listening, and Washington is left without a policy.
(snip/...)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1495260,00.html

Instead of picking up weapons and turning them on each other, some leaders are actually trying to talk to each other. And holy crap!!! People are better off because of it.

I have natural gas heat. I work for a non profit who negotiated what they said was a very good home heating oil contract for their 30 group homes. The company agreed to give the same rate to all of the non profit's employees if they also contract with them. Unfortunately, I have natural gas.

HELP. KeySpan is KILLING ME.

Of course he's a democrat, you think a republican would bend over backwards to help help the poor in our state? I think I have a campaign button from him somewhere - he ran for County Commisioner I believe. Hopefully he'll run again because we need fresh blood in the Delaware democratic party!

Growing Movement of Community Radio in Venezuela
by Sujatha Fernandes
December 24, 2005

Four young people sit around a large table, writing furiously amid piles of notes, cans of soda, and scrunched up papers. They could be kids doing their homework or studying for exams. But these young women from the shantytowns, aged between 17 and 22 years, are preparing for their hour-long program, “Public Power,” on air in ten minutes on community radio station Radio Perola, 92.3FM, in the Caracas parish of Caricuao.
(snip)

One member of the collective, Gladys Romero, was 14 years old at the time of the coup. She recalls that, “There was a lot of misinformation, they took the alternative media off the air, and I as a student, as a young person, felt the need to promote the real information to inform the community about what was happening in the country.”

The private media has accumulated a large degree of power since the late seventies, due to the growing deregulation and commercialization of media in Venezuela. In 1979, the Venezuelan government sold Channel 5, a state-owned channel, to the private sector. Through the eighties and nineties, successive governments continued the expansion of concessions to media corporations, leading to the centralization of the media in a small number of conglomerates. Private television at a national level has been monopolized by the Cisneros group (Venevisión) and the 1BC group of Phelps-Granier (Radio Caracas Televisión). Out of 44 regional television networks, nearly all are linked by chain to private networks Venevisión, Radio Caracas Televisión, Televen, and Globovision. This small group of corporations also control radio-electric spaces and the national press.

Since Chávez was elected president in 1998, and especially in the tense days of the oil strikes by business sectors in December 2001 and during the lead-up to the coup in April 2002, this powerful private media has run a fierce campaign to discredit him. A few hours after Chávez was removed from office on April 11, 2002, opposition spokesperson Napoleón Bravo came on the air and falsely broadcast that Chávez had resigned. While opposition leaders were taking over the presidential palace and dissolving democratic institutions, the private media was running its regular broadcast of cooking shows, soap operas, and cartoons. Members of the community were deprived of access to information, as the government-owned television station, Channel 8, and several community radio and television stations were taken off the air.

During this time, it was mainly the alternative print media that was able to get the message out to the people about what was happening. According to Roberto, a worker at the Caracas Municipal Press, activists came to the press and labored to produce 100,000 copies of a bulletin, informing people about what was happening. Radio Fe y Alegría also came back on the air and began to make announcements about the coup. Through the bulletins, alternative radio, and the exchange of text messages through cell phones, people were able to pass on the news of the coup and come out onto the streets in massive demonstrations that would put Chávez back into power.
(snip/...)

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=45&ItemID=9393