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
4 - Boosting profits through foreign intervention
If the
U.S. succeeds in ousting Maduro and putting Guaidó in his place, it
will only be the latest example of U.S. government policy that
directly benefits the bottom lines of Chevron and Halliburton.
In
Chevron’s case, the company’s growth to become one of the largest
oil companies in the world has consistently been aided by the U.S.
establishment, regardless of whether Democrats or Republicans held
the presidency. Indeed, as Seeking Alpha noted: “Chevron’s
stocks gained a combined 247% under Presidents Reagan and George HW
Bush. Under President George W Bush, its shares rose by 157%.
Meanwhile, Chevron’s shares picked up 222% and 112% under
Presidents Clinton and Obama, respectively.”
Notably,
Chevron has also worked with past U.S. presidents in undermining
democratically-elected governments in order to advance its business
interests, with the most recent example taking place in Haiti. Cables
published by WikiLeaks showed that Chevron, in 2006 and 2007,
partnered with ExxonMobil and the U.S. government to undermine the
presidency of former Haitian president René Préval after he forged
a deal with Chávez’s PetroCaribe alliance that allowed Haiti to
buy subsidized Venezuelan oil.
Furthermore,
Chevron also benefited greatly from the U.S. invasion of Iraq and
its representatives were among those who met with then-Vice President
Dick Cheney in 2003 to plan Iraq’s “postwar” — i.e.,
post-invasion — industry that led Chevron to acquire ownership of
several Iraqi oil fields. Notably, the family of then-President
George W. Bush is one of Chevron’s largest shareholders. In
addition, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was a
Chevron executive throughout the 1990s, and was in charge of public
policy for its board of directors immediately prior to joining the
Bush administration. Rice even had a Chevron oil tanker named in her
honor in 1993.
Though
Chevron greatly benefited from the Bush administration’s
destruction of Iraq, Halliburton came away the biggest winner from
the Iraq war, making $39.5 billion off the conflict and its aftermath
after being awarded numerous, lucrative contracts to “rebuild”
the country. This outcome is unsurprising given that Cheney served as
the company’s CEO for decades and retained $34 million in company
stock throughout his tenure as U.S. vice president.
Iraq
had been targeted by the Bush administration soon after Bush came to
power, particularly following the formation of Cheney’s 2001 Energy
Task Force, which called for the privatization of Iraq’s
then-nationalized oil resources and reviewed maps of Iraq’s oil
fields and lists of companies seeking contracts with Baghdad years
before the war officially began.
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