If
Guaidó comes to power and privatizes PDVSA, U.S. oil companies —
with Chevron and Halliburton leading the pack — stand to make
record profits in the world’s most oil-rich nation, as they did in
Iraq following the privatization of its national oil industry after
U.S. intervention.
by
Whitney Webb
Part
7 - Washington’s gift to Big Oil: privatize PDVSA, no matter the
human cost
As with
Iraq, Libya and other U.S. oil-motivated interventions of the past,
the destruction of Venezuela’s nationalized oil industry and its
privatization to American oil companies — especially Chevron and
Halliburton — is the guiding factor behind the U.S.’ current
regime-change policy targeting Caracas. While past administrations
attempted to obfuscate their “wars for oil” as “restoring
democracy,” Trump administration officials and other “coup
architects” have recently “gone off script” and overtly stated
the guiding principle behind its Venezuela policy.
However,
the timing of the Trump administration’s regime-change push in
Venezuela is key. While companies like Chevron and Halliburton have
been hemorrhaging profits in recent years, they have so far withstood
the fallout due to the record high production of U.S. shale oil. Yet,
the “golden age” of U.S. shale is quickly disappearing, with top
industry insiders like Harold Hamm along with Halliburton’s rival
company, Schlumberger, expecting shale output growth to slow by as
much as 50 percent this year. Hamm is a close confidant of President
Trump.
If this
comes to pass, American oil companies will be in a bad way. Yet, if
Guaidó comes to power and privatizes PDVSA, U.S. oil companies —
with Chevron and Halliburton leading the pack — stand to make
record profits in the world’s most oil rich nation, as they did in
Iraq following the privatization of its national oil industry after
U.S. intervention.
Worst of
all, as the U.S.’ past interventions in Iraq and Libya and
elsewhere have shown, Washington stands willing to kill untold
thousands of innocent people in Venezuela — either through direct
military intervention or a proxy war — to benefit American oil
companies.
Will the
American people let yet another presidential administration destroy
an entire nation for Chevron, Halliburton and other powerful American
corporations?
***
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