Like many others in the U.S., I woke up today to find out the Trump regime had bombed Caracas and a nearby town while grabbing Venezuela's president and his wife. News is now coming out that at least 40 people were killed in the attack.
The regime leaders sat in a pseudo situation room at Mar-A-Lago with a large screen TV in the background showing their Twitter feed, so they could monitor that most-important aspect of their rule in real time.
Many people think this is about oil, and I think that's right in one sense. On BlueSky, Josh Grubbs, an addiction researcher/psychologist, wrote:
It’s 1990, I’m 1 years old, and the republican president of the US is attacking a petrol state
It’s 2004, I’m 15 years old, and the republican president of the US is attacking a petrol state
It’s 2026, I’m 37 years old, and the republican president of the US is attacking a petrol state
But others who, it looks like, know what they're talking about point out that attacking to control Venezuela's oil is stupid.
Kate Aronoff (writer for the New Republic):
The US produces more than 13 million barrels of oil per day. Venezuela produces less than 1 million per day. There's a global oil glut, i.e. lower prices. That's bad for US producers, who need higher prices to break even. Hard to imagine they're eager to make big new investments in an unstable place with. decrepit infrastructure.
Sky Marchini, economist and policy researcher:
I know several oil barons, I’ve had the oil and gas industry as clients in a past life: none of them want the Venezuelan oil, it’s dog shit quality and getting the PDVSA fields up to modern standards would take 20 years! It’s just trump being stuck in 1987
literally every oil person I know doesn’t want anything to do with Venezuela: it’s just not worth it at current and foreseeable oil prices.
It would cost tens of billions of dollars to get the equipment back to modern standards, and then require a ton of operations work to actually extract oil
And it may have made sense to do so in 2005 when oil was 100 bucks a barrel, but it does not make sense to do so when oil is 60 bucks a barrel and you can frack light crude all day in the Permian
So here we are, with these power-mad fascists talking at the same time about Greenland, Mexico, and Cuba and god knows what else. As their masked invaders attack our own people here at home.
1 comment:
It would be fitting for the current occupant to think in dated terms about oil, just as his thinking about NYC is stuck in the 1970s or so. And of course no one around him would be willing to correct him.
The idea that the men standing behind the occupant today are going to run a foreign country is beyond preposterous. And the idea that Cuba is next is more preposterous still. Maybe Melania can be established as a new Eva Perón in one or the other and take some of the burden off Hegseth and Rubio.
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